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Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a complex and progressive brain injury with no approved treatments that needs both short- and long-term therapeutic strategies to cope with the variety of physiopathological mechanisms involved. In particular, neuroinflammation is a key process modulating TBI outcome, and the potentiation of these mechanisms by pro-inflammatory gene therapy vectors could contribute to the injury progression. Here, we evaluate in the controlled cortical impact model of TBI, the safety of integrative-deficient lentiviral vectors (IDLVs) or the non-viral HNRK recombinant modular protein/DNA nanovector. These two promising vectors display different tropisms, transduction efficiencies, short- or long-term transduction or inflammatory activation profile. We show that the brain intraparenchymal injection of these vectors overexpressing green fluorescent protein after a CCI is not neurotoxic, and interestingly, can decrease the short-term sensory neurological deficits, and diminish the brain tissue loss at 90 days post lesion (dpl). Moreover, only IDLVs were able to mitigate the memory deficits elicited by a CCI. These vectors did not alter the microglial or astroglial reactivity at 90 dpl, suggesting that they do not potentiate the on-going neuroinflammation. Taken together, these data suggest that both types of vectors could be interesting tools for the design of gene therapy strategies targeting immediate or long-term neuropathological mechanisms of TBI.

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a leading cause of death and disability and is a risk factor for the later development of neuropsychiatric disorders and neurodegenerative diseases. Many models of TBI have been developed, but their further refinement and a more detailed long-term follow-up is needed. We have used the Thy1-YFP-H transgenic mouse line and the parallel rod floor test to produce an unbiased and robust method for the evaluation of the multiple effects of a validated model of controlled cortical injury. This approach reveals short- and long-term progressive changes, including compromised biphasic motor function up to 85 days post-lesion, which correlates with neuronal atrophy, dendrite and spine loss, and long-term axonal pathology evidenced by axon spheroids and fragmentation. Here we present methods for inducing a controlled cortical injury in the Thy1-YFP-H transgenic mouse line and for evaluating the resulting deficits in the parallel rod floor test. This technique constitutes a new, unbiased, and robust method for the evaluation of motor and behavioral alterations after TBI. © 2018 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., (Copyright © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.)