Non-Viral Delivery System and Targeted Bone Disease Therapy

Abstract

Skeletal systems provide support, movement, and protection to the human body. It can be affected by several life suffering bone disorders such as osteoporosis, osteoarthritis, and bone cancers. It is not an easy job to treat bone disorders because of avascular cartilage regions. Treatment with non-specific drug delivery must utilize high doses of systemic administration, which may result in toxicities in non-skeletal tissues and low therapeutic efficacy. Therefore, in order to overcome such limitations, developments in targeted delivery systems are urgently needed. Although the idea of a general targeted delivery system using bone targeting moieties like bisphosphonates, tetracycline, and calcium phosphates emerged a few decades ago, identification of carrier systems like viral and non-viral vectors is a recent approach. Viral vectors have high transfection efficiency but are limited by inducing immunogenicity and oncogenicity. Although non-viral vectors possess low transfection efficiency they are comparatively safe. A number of non-viral vectors including cationic lipids, cationic polymers, and cationic peptides have been developed and used for targeted delivery of DNA, RNA, and drugs to bone tissues or cells with successful consequences. Here we mainly discuss such various non-viral delivery systems with respect to their mechanisms and applications in the specific targeting of bone tissues or cells. Moreover, we discuss possible therapeutic agents that can be delivered against various bone related disorders.

Recent advances in polymeric biomaterials-based gene delivery for cartilage repair

“…Nanosized metal or inorganic vectors with large surface area have some advantages including facile production, functionalization and stability. However, metal nanoparticles can easily accumulate in cells and affect cell growth due to their stability, while inorganic vectors are limited by the low transfection efficiency and potential cytotoxicity [ 19 ]. Cationic lipids have a wide size range, high DNA loading capacity and storage stability [ 20 ].…”

“…There are growing evidences that gene delivery using synthetic polymers for cartilage repair is a promising option for cartilage repair ( Table 1 ). More details about gene delivery non-polymeric vectors can refer to related reviews [ [17] , [18] , [19] , [24] , [25] , [26] ]. In the following section, we briefly introduce the polymeric vectors involved in gene delivery for cartilage repair, with more focus on polymer-mediated.…”

“…By optimizing the chemical composition and structure of the polymeric vectors, a safe, stable and non-immunogenic system with modest transfer efficiencies (5–40%) can be obtained [ 7 ]. An effective gene delivery system not only needs to protect the therapeutic genes in the cytosol from degradation, but also requires to overcome many intracellular and extracellular barriers while delivering genes directly to the cells of the target tissue, thus avoiding off-target toxicity and negative host responses [ 7 , 19 ]. To address this issue, an efficient and specific delivery system was constructed by Pi et al ( Fig.…”

Silver Nanoparticles Synthesized with Rumex hymenosepalus: A Strategy to Combat Early Mortality Syndrome (EMS) in a Cultivated White Shrimp

“…Electrophoretic determination of ζ is most commonly made in aqueous solvent and moderate electrolyte concentration. f ka , in this case, takes the value of 1.5 and is referred to as the classical Smoluchowski approximation [37].…”

The Development of Functional Non-Viral Vectors for Gene Delivery

“…Because of these advantages, non-viral vectors, such as polymers [3,10,11,12], lipids [13,14,15,16], and functional vectors [2,5,6], have been developed and applied in gene therapy. Although there are already many review articles that discuss non-viral vectors, such as cationic polymers and cationic lipids, they mainly focus on the structure–activity relationship of these materials or the biological barriers to gene delivery, such as poly( β -amino esters) (PBAEs) linear polymers [17], hydrophobic chains modified cationic lipids [18], headgroup evolution of cationic lipids [19], surface-engineered dendrimers [1], morphologically distinct cationic lipid–nucleic acid carriers [20], etc.…”