High pre-existing antibodies against viral vectors reduce their functionality and may lead to adverse complications. To circumvent this problem in future gene therapy approaches, we tested the seroprevalence of a large range of human adenovirus types in patients with neuromuscular disorders (NMDs) to find appropriate viral vector candidates for gene replacement therapy for NMDs. Binding and neutralizing antibodies against 39 human adenovirus types were tested in the sera of 133 patients with NMDs and 76 healthy controls aged 17-92 years. The influence of age, sex, and NMDs on antibody levels was analyzed. The seroprevalence of different adenoviruses in the cohort varied widely. The highest levels of binding antibodies were detected against HAdV-D27, -C1, -D24, -D70, -B14, -C6, -D13, -B34, and -E4, whereas the lowest reactivity was detected against HAdV-F41, -A31, -B11, -D75, -D8, -D65, -D26, -D80, and -D17. The highest neutralizing reactivity was observed against HAdV-B3, -C2, -E4, -C1, -G52, -C5, and -F41, whereas the lowest neutralizing reactivity was observed against HAdV-D74, -B34, -D73, -B37, -D48, -D13, -D75, -D8, -B35, and -B16. We detected no influence of sex and only minor differences between different age groups. Importantly, there were no significant differences between healthy controls and patients with NMDs. Our data show that patients with NMDs have very similar levels of binding and neutralizing antibodies against HAdV compared to healthy individuals, and we identified HAdV-A31, -B16, -B34, -B35, -D8, -D37, -D48, -D73, -D74, -D75, and -D80 as promising candidates for future vector development due to their low binding and neutralizing antibody prevalence.
Keywords: HAdV; binding antibodies; gene therapy; human adenovirus; neuromuscular disease; neutralizing antibodies; seroprevalence; viral vector.