Studies on Pathogenesis of Chronic Active Epstein-Barr Virus Infection

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Chronic active Epstein-Barr virus(EBV) infection(CAEBV) is a lethal T-or NK-lymphoproliferative disease often occurring in children. This study aimed to clarify the unknown pathogenesis of CAEBV, from which the establishment of a novel remedial strategy against the disease will also benefit.The approach undertaken in this study is to seek for a latent EBV gene(s) resposible for uncontrolled T-or NK-cell-proliferation, which can functionally replace the role of entire EBV genome in the virus-positive T-or NK-cell lines derived from patients with CAEBV. We prepared improved self-inactivating retroviral vectors(SIN-RVs) that can express individual EBV latent genes, e.g., EBNA1, LMP1, LMP2A, BARF0, A73, RPMS1 and EBERs. Also, we successfully constructed an EBNA1 mutant, and incorporated it into the fiber-replaced adenovirus type 5 vector(Adv5/35f-DNE1). Adv5/35f-DNE1 proved that the EBNA1 mutant efficiently eradicates EBV episomes from infected cells and concomitantly impedes the virus-dependent aggressive growth phenotypes of EBV-positive T-or NK-cell lines, thereby indicating that our EBNA1 mutant can act as a dominant-negative(dn) EBNA1.Based on the above data, we have just entered the final aspect of experiments to identify the EBV latent gene(s) essential to T-or NK-cell-proliferation. In parallel, we are invetigating now into whether our dnEBNA1 will provide an additional therapeutic molecule specifically targeting EBV-associated malignancies, by some ways including animal experiments.