Transient proteasome inhibition as a strategy to enhance lentiviral transduction of hematopoietic CD34(+) cells and T lymphocytes: implications for the use of low viral doses and large-size vectors

The proteasome system restricts lentiviral transduction of stem cells. We exploited proteasome inhibition as a strategy to enhance transduction of both hematopoietic stem cells (HSC) and T lymphocytes with low dose or large-size lentiviral vectors (LV). HSC showed higher transduction efficiency if transiently exposed to proteasome inhibitor MG132 (41.8% vs 10.7%, p < 0.0001). Treatment with MG132 (0.5 μM) retained its beneficial effect with 3 different LV of increasing size up to 10.9 Kb (p < 0.01). We extended, for the first time, the application of proteasome inhibition to the transduction of T lymphocytes. A transient exposure to MG132 significantly improved lentiviral T-cell transduction. The mean percentage of transduced T cells progressively increased from 13.5% of untreated cells, to 21% (p = 0.3), 30% (p = 0.03) and 37% (p = 0.01) of T lymphocytes that were pre-treated with MG132 at 0.1, 0.5 and 1 μM, respectively. MG132 did not affect viability or functionality of HSC or T cells, nor significantly increased the number of integrated vector copies. Transient proteasome inhibition appears as a new procedure to safely enhance lentiviral transduction of HSC and T lymphocytes with low viral doses. This approach could be useful in settings where the use of large size vectors may impair optimal viral production.