Dendron-functionalised hyperbranched bis-MPA polyesters as efficient non-viral vectors for gene therapy in different cell lines

Maria San Anselmo, Alejandro Postigo, Alexandre Lancelot, Jose Luis Serrano, Teresa Sierra* and Silvia Hernandez-Ainsa.* Biomaterials Science, 2022, DOI: 10.1039/D2BM00365A

Gene therapy has become a relevant tool in the biomedical field to treat or even prevent some diseases. The effective delivery of genetic material into the cell remains a crucial step to succeed in this purpose. In the search for efficient non-viral vectors, a series of amino-terminated dendronized hyperbranched polymers (DHPS) of different generations based either on bis-MPA or bis-GMPA have been designed. All of them have demonstrated an accurate ability to complex two types of genetic material, a DNA plasmid and a siGFP, yielding dendriplexes. Moreover, some of them have proved to be able to deliver the genetic material inside the cells, resulting into the effective accomplishment of the desired genetic modification and improving the activity of some commercial transfection reagents. Different cell lines, including cancer and mesenchymal stem cells, have been studied here to evaluate the DHPs ability as vectors for transfection. Treatments based on mesenchymal stem cells are gaining importance due to their pluripotency. Thus, is of special relevance the introduction of a genetic modification into a mesenchymal cell line as it allows to act over a wide spectrum of tissues after inducing cellular differentiation.

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