. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2010 Jul 12.

Published in final edited form as: Eur J Nucl Med Mol Imaging. 2005 Dec;32(Suppl 2):S358–S383. doi: 10.1007/s00259-005-1960-3

Table 2.

Advantages and disadvantages of viral vectors for gene therapy

Virus	Maximum capacity	Advantages	Disadvantages
Adenovirus	8 kb	Broad cell tropism, infection of dividing and non-dividing cells, easy to produce at high titres	Inflammatory and immune responses, transient expression
HD-Ad	36 kb	Broad cell tropism, infection of dividing and non-dividing cells, less inflammatory and cellular immune response, longer term transgene expression	Difficulties in large-scale production
AAV	5 kb, 10 kb (concatamers)	Broad cell tropism, infection of dividing and non-dividing cells, integration into host genome	Difficulties in producing pure preparations at high titres, discrete immune response
HSV-1	30150 kb	Broad cell tropism, latency in neurons, very stable	Highly toxic
Lentivirus	10 kb	Infection of dividing and non-dividing cells, integration into host genome	Toxic if not packaged as helper virus-free amplicons