Engineering the DNA: Nanoparticles of biodegradable polymers for gene therapy of hepatitis B

Abstract

This thesis is aiming to apply polymeric nanopartical techniques to the gene therapy area. It combines principles from gene delivery, nanotechnology and polymer chemistry in order to improve the current polymeric vectors for gene delivery by investigation and evaluating the novel polymeric based gene delivery systems for plasmid DNA delivery as well as the delivery of short interference RNAi. Two independent research topics have been developed under the whole scheme of polymeric nanoparticles for gene delivery. One is about the evaluation of biodegradable nanoparticles as the RNAi gene delivery systems and the other one is regarding investigating the enhancement of polymer mediated gene transfection by co-administration of Vitamin E d-a-tocopheryl polyethylene glycol 1000 succinate (Vitamin E TPGS).Our results show that cationic nanoparticles can effectively deliver the siRNA and TPGS enhanced transfection efficiency of P-glycoprotein positively expressed cell lines.