Enhanced polymeric nanoparticles for gene delivery

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Biological Engineering Division, 2007.

Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Green, Jordan Jamieson
Other Authors: Robert S. Langer.
Format: Thesis
Language:eng
Published: Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2009
Subjects:
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/44299
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author Green, Jordan Jamieson
author2 Robert S. Langer.
author_facet Robert S. Langer.
Green, Jordan Jamieson
author_sort Green, Jordan Jamieson
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description Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Biological Engineering Division, 2007.
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spelling mit-1721.1/442992019-04-15T00:36:54Z Enhanced polymeric nanoparticles for gene delivery Green, Jordan Jamieson Robert S. Langer. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Biological Engineering Division. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Biological Engineering Division. Biological Engineering Division. Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Biological Engineering Division, 2007. Includes bibliographical references. The potential of gene therapy to treat disease and improve human health is tremendous. The failure of viral gene therapy clinical trials due to toxicity, immunogenicity, and carcinogenicity has been tragic and strongly motivates a non-viral approach. However, non-viral gene delivery is currently ineffective. Here, we show that polymeric nanoparticles composed of poly([beta]-amino esters) (PBAEs) and DNA can be formulated to be stable in the presence of serum proteins and have high gene delivery without toxicity to human primary cells. The biophysical properties of PBAE/DNA nanoparticles have good correlation to transfection efficacy when tested in the appropriate media conditions. We also show that electrostatic interactions can drive peptide coating of nanoparticles and enable ligand-specific gene delivery. A biphasic efficacy relationship exists for peptide weight ratio, overall charge ratio, and ligand length, with intermediate values of coating being optimal. A balance is required when seeking to design nanoparticles that have reduced nonspecific uptake, but increased ligand-specific uptake. We develop a high-throughput assay to quantify polymer/DNA binding as a gene delivery bottleneck and find that a biphasic relationship exists between polymer/DNA binding constant, Ka, and delivery efficacy. We also show that end-modified PBAEs can be as effective as adenovirus for gene delivery. In comparison to the previous "gold standard" for polymeric transfection, 25 kDa polyethylenimine, the PBAE nanoparticles presented here have 100x higher efficacy while simultaneously having 100x lower toxicity. Small structural changes were found to have dramatic effects on multiple steps of gene delivery including the DNA binding affinity, nanoparticle size, intracellular DNA uptake, and final protein expression. (cont.) We show that small modifications to the termini of a polymer can significantly increase its in vivo activity and demonstrate potential utility of these polymers in the fields of cancer therapy, genetic vaccines, and stem cell engineering. As the enhanced polymeric gene delivery nanoparticles described here have many attractive properties over a virus including high safety, low immunogenicity, high nucleic acid cargo capacity, ease in manufacture, a coating method for targeted delivery, and flexibility for future design improvements, we believe that these polymeric nanoparticles may be promising alternatives for therapeutic gene delivery applications. by Jordan Jamieson Green. Ph.D. 2009-01-30T16:29:50Z 2009-01-30T16:29:50Z 2007 2007 Thesis http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/44299 272382732 eng MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582 228 p. application/pdf Massachusetts Institute of Technology
spellingShingle Biological Engineering Division.
Green, Jordan Jamieson
Enhanced polymeric nanoparticles for gene delivery
title Enhanced polymeric nanoparticles for gene delivery
title_full Enhanced polymeric nanoparticles for gene delivery
title_fullStr Enhanced polymeric nanoparticles for gene delivery
title_full_unstemmed Enhanced polymeric nanoparticles for gene delivery
title_short Enhanced polymeric nanoparticles for gene delivery
title_sort enhanced polymeric nanoparticles for gene delivery
topic Biological Engineering Division.
url http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/44299
work_keys_str_mv AT greenjordanjamieson enhancedpolymericnanoparticlesforgenedelivery