TITLE: Synthetic In Vitro Delivery Systems for Plasmid DNA in Eukaryotes

Authors: L. Adriana Avila, Stella Y. Lee, John M. Tomich

Success for gene therapy clinical protocols depends on the design of safe and efficient gene carriers. Nature had already designed efficient DNA or RNA delivery devices, namely virus particles. However, they have a propensity to trigger neutralizing and other immune responses and insertional mutagenesis have limited their clinical use. Alternatively, safer approaches involving non-viral carriers have been and continue to be developed although they have not reached the transfection levels achieved by viruses. Those methods can be broadly classified into two categories: chemical and physical methods. In this review we present the most common and recent chemical non-viral methods to introduce, in vitro, pDNA into eukaryotic cells.