Muscle-based gene therapy: Realistic possibilities for the future

The past five years have witnessed tremendous growth in the field of gene therapy, with pre-clinical and clinical gene therapy trials for diseases as diverse as cancer, AIDS and atherosclerosis. These studies have utilized many different vectors and target organs in order to achieve therapeutic effects. In this review, we examine the rationale for using skeletal muscle as a target tissue for gene therapy, discuss the wide array of vectors that have been used for muscle-based gene therapy, summarize the disease-targets that have been approached using these techniques, and discuss some of the obstacles that remain to be overcome en route to successful muscle-based human gene therapy.