Background

Though therapeutic techniques are developing rapidly nowadays, some human diseases such as cancer and AIDS are extremely difficult to effect a radical cure. Gene therapy cures diseases by using DNA that encodes a functional, therapeutic gene to replace a mutated gene. Therefore, gene therapy is efficient to cure diseases results from gene mutation such as cancer and chronic infectious diseases.

Two major methods are applied to gene therapy. One is viral vectors. The other is non-viral vectors. Viral vectors are efficient to transfer foreign gene into cells and gene is efficiently expressed. But, on the other hand, viral vectors are hard to target specific cells which will decrease the percentage of the target gene into target cells. Moreover, we can't sure that viral vectors are not infectious. It ceases to be a safe way for gene therapy. As a consequence, non-viral vectors gain increasing attention since the late 20th century. Several methods for gene therapy with non-viral vector are studied by researchers such as electroporation, gene gun, magnetofection and so on.

In our project, the novel modular DNA carrier protein is selected as one of the gene transfer vector. This nucleic acid transfer system was developed by Prof. Dr Wels from the Institute for Experimental Cancer Research, Tumor Biology Center and his cooperators in 1998.

Introduction

Mechanism

Purification

Transfection

Results

Prospects