Therapeutic Benefits and Adverse Effects of Combined Proangiogenic Gene Therapy in Mouse Critical Leg Ischemia

Therapeutic effects of the angiogenic combination FGF2-Cyr61 is observed with short-term transgene expression, but the treatment is significantly more efficient when a long-term expression viral vector is used. However, the rAAV-FGFiCyr generated therapeutic benefit only when injected in an ischemic leg, whereas the same dose of rAAV exhibited deleterious effects when administrated to healthy animals. These data may contribute to the understanding of the moderate success of proangiogenic treatments in CLI gene therapy clinical assays.