We used non-invasive optical imaging of firefly luciferase to repeatedly monitor, in living animals, the ability of sCAR-EGF (i) to "transductionally untarget" systemically administered Ad.CMVfLuc, an adenovirus that constitutively expresses luciferase, from normal tissues and (ii) to "transductionally redirect" adenovirus infection in mice to xenograft tumors that express elevated epidermal growth factor (EGF) receptor levels.
Molecular recognition of class I and class II RTKs during adenovirus infection may not be due strictly to amino acid structure, however, since EGF-R but not p185c-neu is down-regulated in cells where it is significantly overexpressed.