What safety concerns surround the use of lentiviral vectors?
The two main safety concerns surrounding the use of lentiviral vectors noted by the NIH include: 1) The potential for generation of replication-competent lentivirus 2) The potential for oncogenesis These concerns are primarily addressed by the design of the vectors used and by safe laboratory practice. In terms of vector design, second and third generation lentiviral systems provided by Addgene separate transfer, envelope, and packaging components of the virus onto different vectors. The transfer vector encodes the gene of interest and contains the sequences that will incorporate into the host cell genome, but cannot produce functional viral particles without the genes encoded in the envelope and packaging vectors. Unless recombination occurs between the packaging, envelope, and transfer vectors, and the resulting construct is packaged into a viral particle, it is not possible for viruses normally produced from these systems to replicate and produce more virus after the initial infecti
