Gene Therapy in Bone Regeneration: A Summary of Delivery Approaches for Effective Therapies - Intracellular Delivery: Fundamentals and Applications - page 813

Gene Therapy in Bone Regeneration:
A Summary of Delivery Approaches
for Effective Therapies
Laura Rose, Ross Fitzsimmons, Tarek El-Bialy, and Hasan Uludağ
Abstract Injuries involving bones are a significant burden on the health care system.
While biological therapies for stimulation of bone formation and repair have advanced
to clinical practise, gene delivery towards the same goal is actively explored to pro-
vide more cost-effective and efficacious therapies. The viral carriers have proven to
be effective for delivery of genes involved in bone tissue regeneration, but the safety
concerns associated with viral carriers prevent their widespread clinical use. Instead,
a better understanding of the viral mechanisms of gene delivery is guiding the design
of effective non-viral gene carriers. This chapter will review the critical features of
viral carriers that make them effective in gene delivery to human cells. Intracellular
events in trafficking of viral vectors are linked to viral structural features and use
of functional peptide motifs for mimicking viral delivery have been summarized.
Non-viral approaches to gene delivery in the context of bone regeneration and repair
have been reviewed, with emphasis on the challenges facing such a gene delivery.
Therapeutic outcomes obtained from animal studies were critically summarized and
the range of promising agents for gene delivery has been reviewed.
Keywords Bone regeneration • Gene delivery • Bone morphogenetic proteins
• Viral carriers • Non-viral carriers • Biomaterials
L. Rose , R. Fitzsimmons, T. El-Bialy, and H. Uludağ
Department of Biomedical Engineering, Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry and Engineering,
University of Alberta, Alberta, Canada
e-mail: [e-mail]; [e-mail]
H. Uludağ ( * )
Department of Chemical & Materials Engineering, Faculty of Engineering,
University of Alberta, Alberta, Canada
and
Faculty of Pharmacy & Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of Alberta, Alberta, Canada
e-mail: [e-mail]
T. El-Bialy
Department of Dentistry, Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry, University of Alberta,
Alberta, Canada
e-mail: [e-mail]