Amphotropic murine leukemia virus (MLV) replicates in cells from various mammalian species, including humans, and is a potential contaminant in MLV vector preparations for human gene transfer studies. Mus dunni fibroblasts are routinely used for amplification and detection of contaminating virus. We have recently characterized an amphotropic MLV mutant lacking the 75-bp viral enhancer elements and spontaneous MLV-(RCMV) recombinants that have acquired cytomegalovirus (CMV) transcription elements. Both of these viruses replicate in specific human cell types. To test
Keywords: MLV; murine leukemia virus; amphotropic; Mus dunni; replication; detectionAmphotropic murine leukemia virus was originally isolated from feral mice and found to replicate in cells from various mammalian species, including humans.1,2 The env gene of isolate 4070A 3 was subsequently used for transduction of primate cells with the newly developed murine leukemia virus (MLV) vectors. 4,5 Human gene transfer studies frequently use MLV-based vectors with amphotropic host range to introduce and express markeror therapeutic genes. 6 Recombinant, replication-competent amphotropic murine leukemia virus is a potential contaminant and safety risk in these vector preparations.7,8 Replication-competent virus can potentially arise at all stages of vector production by recombination between vector and packaging constructs or host DNA, such as endogenous retroviruses. The probability of such a recombination and the exact genotype of the recombinant virus depends on the design of the production process and the nature of packaging-and vector constructs. Considerable progress has been made during the past years to exclude the generation of replication competent virus (for a recent review see Ref. 10). The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has recently released 'Guidance on testing for replication competent retrovirus in retroviral vector-based gene therapy products and during follow-up of patients in clinical trials using retroviral vec- 11 As a routine procedure the FDA recommends testing samples of the cell banks, vector supernatant and ex vivo transduced cells by infection on a Mus dunni fibroblast line 12 and subsequent detection in a PG-4 S+LϪ indicator assay.We used an amphotropic host range mutant of Moloney MLV, MLV-(MOA) (Figure 1), to study replication and gene expression of amphotropic MLV in human cells. 13 In brief, the provirus MLV-(MOA) is based on the Moloney-MLV clone 63-2, 14 but contains the