siRNA's are being developed to target therapeutically important genes involved in cancer, viral infections and other diseases. However, these short nucleic acids are unstable within the extracellular environment, cannot cross cell membranes to accomplish their mission, and due to their small size are readily secreted by the renal system.  Progress to overcome some of these problems has been made using viral and synthetic vectors, though there is no general method for siRNA delivery as they all present several limitations. In this study, four different polycationic nanoparticles were tested in CHO-K1 and HeLa cell lines for their transfection efficiency of firefly luciferase (GL2 + GL3) siRNA.  Our results show that reducing the polycationic character of the nanoparticles eases their toxicity while maintaining their high transfection efficiency, which is actually increased by magnetofection.  The results also show that the two cell lines studied responded differently to these materials.

Intracellular delivery of siRNA by  polycationic superparamagnetic nanoparticles

243rd National Meeting (2012)

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