Magnetofection-based novel gene delivery

Abstract

Salivary glands can be a good model for gene delivery to treat systemic and oral disease. Non-viral vectors show little concern about the safety and biocompatibility issues but transfection efficiency is extremely lower than that of viral vectors. In this study, we report a magnetic gene transfer system combining extra-dermal magnetic field and Iron oxide-Mesoporous sillica-PEI nanoparticle to overcome those major hurdles of gene transfer to salivary glands. Uniformly constructed iron oxide nanoparticles were encapsulated by mesoporous silica, then chemically conjugated with linear 10kDa PEI(Poly-ethyl-imine) and TAT peptide (MSNNP). MSNNPs were complexed with therapeutic Aquaporin 5-GFP gene in 20:1(w/w) ratio then transferred to HSG cell-line. Under non-flowing condition transfection efficiency of MSNNP combined with magnetic field was 3 times higher than that of Lipofectamine 2000 but under the 60ml/hr flowing condition MSNNP/magnetic field showed 2.7 folds higher transfection efficiency than Lipofectamine 2000. Confocal image of HSG transfected with MSNNP showed distinctive AQP5-GFP protein expressed and located at membrane region. Magnetofection using MSNNP seems to be a practicable and promising system for non-viral gene delivery to salivary glands.