pH-Sensitive Modification of Chitosan as a Gene Carrier

Abstract

The success of gene therapy is to find out the effective gene carriers. Recently, non-viral vectors have been receiving increased attention because of their biosafety, high flexibility of size of the delivered gene and simple production. Among non-viral vectors, chitosan and chitosan derivatives as gene carriers have been tried owing to several advantages such as biocompatibility,biodegradability and low cytotoxicity. On the other hand, the low transfection efficiency of chitosan as a gene carrier needs to be overcome for application to clinical trials. The objective of this review is to discuss pH-sensitive modification of chitosan to improve transfection efficiency.