Expression Of HCV Core Gene In An Eukaryotic Cell And Mouse Plasmacytoma Tumors

Hepatitis C virus (HCV) is the most common etiologic agent of posttransfusion and sporadic nonA, nonB hepatitis. The majority of HCV-infected individuals develop chronic infection which may progress to liver cirrhosis and eventually hepatocellular carcinoma. A vaccine protective against HCV infection is not currently available, and antiviral treatments are ineffective in majority of HCV-infected patients.The lack of an efficient cell culture system and small-animal models has limited the systematic study of the pathogenesis as well as the evaluation of novel antiviral agents and gene therapeutic strategies aimed at blocking HCV replication and gene expression. A few laboratories have reported experimental HCV replication system and small-animal models. Scientists have got many valuable results on HCV utilizing these cell culture systems and animal models. And this has made a base for studying HCV replication mechanism, screening antivirus agents and developing HCV vaccine. However, the study of HCV cell culture system and animal model is still at the early stage and some results are still need to be verified.Due to the specific characteristics of HCV structure gene, it's not easily to establish a cell line, which can express HCV structure gene stably. In many cases, however, their expression decreases after cell passages even if the high level expression is transiently observed. Our aims are to establish a cell line which can express HCV C protein stably, explore the possibility of establishing a mouse plasmacytoma tumor model which express HCV C protein and observe mice's immune response to recombinant pEF-HCV core vector.