Non-viral Gene Therapy - Intracellular Delivery: Fundamentals and Applications - page 674

Alternatively, these nanostructured materials, such as quantum dots and magnetic
nanoparticles may be integrated with other delivery vectors to create multi-func-
tionalized systems armed with multimodal imaging, simultaneous imaging and
gene delivery. Additional functions such as excellent stability and cell or tissue-
specific targetability can be integrated. These multifunctional vectors loaded with
therapeutic genes that contain functional elements which can regulate and direct the
cytonuclear translocation and subsequent transgene expression of genetic payload
are even more exciting directions deserving our efforts in the coming years.
Simultaneous delivery of drugs and genes represents another multifunctionalizing
approach, through which a synergistic therapeutic effect may be achieved. For this
purpose, efficacious methods should be developed to identify appropriate drug-
gene pairs. Nevertheless, despite their promising future, the study on multifunction-
alized gene vectors is still in its infancy stage.
By continuing to observe and understand how naturally evolved systems have
overcome all the delivery barriers via top-down approaches, we may continue to
mimic these natural processes by a well-controlled top-down strategy to develop
highly efficient synthetic systems, thus render nonviral vectors to be important tools
for human gene therapy.
Acknowledgements We gratefully acknowledge the financial support from the National Natural
Science Foundation of China (No. 21004077). JXZ would like to thank the Returnee Start-up
Fund from the Third Military Medical University (2010XHG03).
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