Nature Nanotechnology2021ReviewNon-viral Gene Delivery
Gong N, Sheppard Nc, Billingsley Mm, June Ch, Mitchell Mj.
T-cell-based immunotherapies have shown clinical success in B-cell malignancies, but broad implementation is limited by insufficient T-cell expansion, poor trafficking into solid tumours, T-cell exhaustion in hostile tumour microenvironments, and loss of target antigen expression. Nanomaterials may uniquely overcome…
Read the article →2021ReviewDrug Delivery
Venkatas J, Singh M.
Cervical cancer is immunologically relevant because retained high-risk HPV antigens can be recognised as foreign, making immunotherapy attractive. However, conventional immunotherapy is limited by variable efficacy, immune evasion, cytokine toxicity, and poor targeting. Nanomedicine may improve delivery, targeting…
Read the article →Seminars in Immunology2021ReviewNon-viral Gene Delivery
Est-Witte Se, Livingston Nk, Omotoso Mo, Green Jj, Schneck Jp.
T cell therapies (TIL, TCR, CAR T) show clinical efficacy but are limited by high cost, lengthy ex vivo manufacturing, patient variability, and poor persistence. Nanoparticles offer a modular, universal platform to improve T cell therapy at every stage—from antigen presentation and T cell activation to T cell…
Read the article →Advanced Healthcare Materials2021ReviewNon-viral Gene Delivery
Ho W, Gao M, Li F, Li Z, Zhang X-Q, Xu X.
Nucleic acid vaccines (DNA and mRNA) offer rapid design, adaptability to changing pathogen strains, and stimulation of both humoral and cellular immunity, but their clinical translation is limited by inefficient delivery—nucleic acids are rapidly degraded by endogenous nucleases, have poor cellular uptake due to…
Read the article →Advanced Drug Delivery Reviews2021ReviewNon-viral Gene Delivery
Kim J, Eygeris Y, Gupta M, Sahay G.
mRNA vaccines are promising but naked mRNA is fragile, susceptible to enzymatic degradation, poorly taken up by cells due to electrostatic repulsion, and can trigger innate immune responses. Self-assembly offers a versatile approach to prepare delivery vehicles with customisable properties. The review discusses…
Read the article →Nature Communications2021ReviewNon-viral Gene Delivery
Han X, Zhang H, Butowska K, Swingle Kl, Alameh M-G, Weissman D, Mitchell Mj
RNA therapeutics—ASOs, siRNAs, miRNAs, mRNAs, and CRISPR-Cas9 sgRNAs—are limited by nuclease degradation, large size, and negative charge. Ionisable lipids are the key LNP component that condenses RNA, enables endosomal escape, and reduces toxicity. Since 2008, many ionisable lipids have been created, but the field…
Read the article →Bioengineering & Translational Medicine2021ReviewNon-viral Gene Delivery
Schlich M, Palomba R, Costabile G, Mizrahy S, Pannuzzo M, Peer D, Decuzzi P
Endosomal escape remains the major intracellular barrier for RNA therapeutics. Only a small fraction of RNA delivered by ionisable lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) reaches the cytosol, where siRNA, miRNA, mRNA, and CRISPR components must act. A deeper mechanistic understanding is needed to design next-generation LNPs with…
Read the article →Trends in Molecular Medicine2021ReviewNon-viral Gene Delivery
Likely Citation: Swingle Kl, Hamilton Ag, Mitchell Mj
mRNA is degraded by nucleases and cannot easily cross cell membranes because of its large size and negative charge. Delivery therefore requires encapsulation in vehicles such as lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) to enable protein replacement, vaccines, and gene-editing applications. Onpattro was the first FDA-approved…
Read the article →Nature Reviews Materials2021ReviewNon-viral Gene Delivery
Hou X, Zaks T, Langer R, Dong Y
mRNA has therapeutic potential for vaccines, protein replacement, cancer immunotherapy, cellular reprogramming, and genome editing, but it requires safe, effective, and stable delivery systems to protect it from degradation and enable cellular uptake and mRNA release. Lipid nanoparticles have entered the clinic for…
Read the article →Pharmaceutics2021ReviewNon-viral Gene Delivery
Zak Mm, Zangi L
mRNA therapeutics are limited by innate immune activation, rapid RNase degradation, and inefficient delivery to target organs. Although LNPs are the only clinically approved RNA therapeutic carriers, most systemically delivered LNPs accumulate in the liver, so organ-specific delivery remains a major barrier for…
Read the article →ACS Nano.2021ReviewNon-viral Gene Delivery
Rumiana Tenchov, Robert E. Bird, Allison E. Curtze, Qiongqiong Angela Zhou
Lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) have become key delivery vehicles across pharmaceuticals, with renewed prominence as the delivery platform for COVID-19 mRNA vaccines. The field lacks a broad, quantitative landscape of LNP research across liposomes, solid lipid nanoparticles, nanostructured lipid carriers, cationic…
Read the article →Journal of Drug Delivery Science and Technology2021ReviewNon-viral Gene Delivery
Ashok B, Peppas Na, Wechsler Me
CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing holds major therapeutic promise, but in vivo delivery is arguably the most difficult barrier to clinical translation. Efficient, selective transport of editing components to target cells/tissues while minimising off-target effects remains unresolved. This review critiques lipid- and…
Read the article →2020ResearchNon-viral Gene Delivery
Vitor Francisco, Catarina Rebelo, Artur Filipe Rodrigues, Josephine Blersch, Hugo Fernandes, Lino Ferreira
Non-viral vectors such as nanoparticles (NPs) show promise for RNA-based therapies, but suffer from limited cell targeting, poor cellular internalisation, and inadequate endolysosomal escape capacity. The field lacks a systematic, high-throughput approach to identify effective polymeric nanocarriers that can deliver…
Read the article →Nature Communications2020ResearchNon-viral Gene Delivery
N.N. Parayath, S.B. Stephan, A.L. Koehne, P.S. Nelson, M.T. Stephan
CAR T and TCR T cell therapies are powerful but face prohibitive costs and manufacturing complexity due to the need for leukapheresis, ex vivo transduction, expansion, and quality control—all under GMP conditions. An "off-the-shelf" injectable nanocarrier that can transiently reprogram circulating T cells in vivo…
Read the article →Biomaterials Science (accepted manuscript; manuscript ID BM-ART-09-2020ResearchNon-viral Gene Delivery
Rui Zhang, Rakan El-Mayta, Timothy Murdoch, Claude Warzecha, Margaret Billingsley, Sarah Shepherd, Ningqiang Gong, Lili Wang, James Wilson, Daeyeon Lee, Michael J. Mitchell
LNP delivery to liver versus spleen is difficult to predict from formulation parameters, and the role of helper phospholipids in biodistribution and protein adsorption is incompletely understood. This study probed how helper lipid identity (DOPE vs DSPC) affects LNP accumulation in liver/spleen and interactions with…
Read the article →Angewandte Chemie International Edition2020ResearchNon-viral Gene Delivery
Xuewei Zhao, Jinjin Chen, Min Qiu, Yamin Li, Zachary Glass, Qiaobing Xu
In vivo engineering of T lymphocytes is limited by poor transfection efficiency and reliance on ex vivo electroporation. A non-viral mRNA delivery platform that can target primary T cells in vivo is needed for CAR T-cell therapy, vaccines, and immunotherapy. Rough screening identified imidazole head 93 with O17O…
Read the article →Bioconjugate Chemistry2020ResearchNon-viral Gene Delivery
Margaret M. Billingsley, Nathan Singh, Pranali Ravikumar, Rui Zhang, Carl H. June, Michael J. Mitchell
CAR T cell therapy currently relies on viral vectors or electroporation for T cell engineering. Viral vectors cause permanent CAR expression and carry safety/manufacturing limitations, while electroporation is cytotoxic and requires specialised equipment. A safer, efficient non-viral mRNA delivery platform for human…
Read the article →Journal of Controlled Release2020ResearchNon-viral Gene Delivery
Pedro P. Guimaraes, Rui Zhang, Roman Spektor, Mingchee Tan, Amanda Chung, Margaret M. Billingsley, Rakan El-Mayta, Rachel S. Riley, Lili Wang, James M. Wilson, Michael J. Mitchell
LNP libraries are usually screened in vitro, which poorly predicts in vivo mRNA delivery. A high-throughput in vivo platform was needed to screen many LNP formulations simultaneously and identify lead carriers for functional mRNA delivery. b-mRNA could be detected in liver at doses as low as 17 ng; b-mRNA delivery…
Read the article →Journal of Materials Chemistry B2020ResearchNon-viral Gene Delivery
Yana Tarakanchikova, Albert Muslimov, Igor Sergeev, Kirill Lepik, Nikita Yolshin, Alexander Goncharenko, Kirill Vasilyev, Igor Eliseev, Anton Bukatin, Vladislav Sergeev, Sergey Pavlov, Alexey Popov, Igor Meglinski, Boris Afanasyev, Bogdan Parakhonskiy, Gleb Sukhorukov, Dmitry Gorin
DNA- and mRNA-based therapies are transforming biomedicine, but intracellular delivery—especially to hard-to-transfect, clinically relevant cells such as primary human T lymphocytes—remains a major barrier. Existing non-viral methods often suffer from low transfection efficiency, high toxicity, or complex…
Read the article →Nature Communications2020ResearchNon-viral Gene Delivery
Siddharth Patel, N. Ashwanikumar, Ema Robinson, Yan Xia, Cosmin Mihai, Joseph P. Griffith Iii, Shangguo Hou, Adam A. Esposito, Tatiana Ketova, Kevin Welsher, John L. Joyal, Örn Almarsson, Gaurav Sahay
Endosomal sequestration of lipid-based nanoparticles (LNPs) remains a formidable barrier to delivery, with only <2% of LNPs reaching the cytosol. The role of cholesterol structure in LNP-mediated mRNA delivery and endosomal escape was poorly understood. There is a need to decode the structural characteristics of…
Read the article →Science Translational Medicine2020ResearchNon-viral Gene Delivery
Xueguang Lu, Lei Miao, Wenting Gao, Ziqi Chen, Kevin J. Mchugh, Yehui Sun, Zachary Tochka, Stephanie Tomasic, Kaitlyn Sadtler, Alain Hyacinthe, Yuxuan Huang, Tyler Graf, Quanyin Hu, Morteza Sarmadi, Robert Langer, Daniel G. Anderson, Ana Jaklenec
STING agonists require frequent intratumoral injections over months to achieve efficacy, leading to poor patient adherence, repeated disruption of the tumour microenvironment, increased metastasis risk, and limited applicability to hard-to-reach tumours. A single-injection delivery system that mimics multiple dosing…
Read the article →Molecular Therapy: Nucleic Acids2020ResearchNon-viral Gene Delivery
Rui Yan Yuan, Mahita Varanasi, Shanelle Mendes, Hannah M. Yamagata, David R. Wilson, Jordan J. Green
CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing requires efficient intracellular delivery of large cargo. Viral vectors have packaging and production limitations, and nonviral CRISPR plasmid delivery had mainly been studied for single-site knockout, not for gene deletion requiring two cleavage events. The transfection requirements for…
Read the article →2020ReviewNon-viral Gene Delivery
Zeb A, Rana I, Choi H-I, Et Al.
Biopharmaceuticals have become clinically and commercially important due to their specificity, potency, targeting ability, and reduced side effects, but their macromolecular structure and intrinsic instability make formulation and administration challenging; parenteral delivery remains the only viable option in most…
Read the article →Frontiers in Chemistry2020ReviewNon-viral Gene Delivery
Guevara Ml, Persano F, Persano S
mRNA is a flexible and potentially safer cancer immunotherapy platform, but its clinical use has been limited by extracellular instability, poor cellular uptake, and inefficient endosomal escape. Lipid nanoparticles have become the most advanced non-viral delivery system for mRNA, enabling therapeutic vaccines…
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