Functional chitosan nanocarriers for potential applications in gene therapy

Abstract

Functional chitosan nanocarriers for suicide gene therapy have been developed. Folic acid conjugated chitosan (FA-chitosan) was used to synthesize zinc sulphide quantum dots (ZnS QDs), which was further converted to chitosan nanocarriers, where the integrated FA acts as targeting, and the embedded QDs as imaging functionalities, respectively. The synthesized nanocarriers were almost spherical with sizes of ~ 75 nm and were nontoxic to the mammalian cell lines. Fluorescence of the QDs was exploited to image the cellular uptake of the nanocarriers. Binding of the plasmid DNA, containing the suicide genes encoding for cytosine deaminase-uracil phosphoribosyltransferase (pCD-UPRT) with the nanocarriers, was investigated by gel retardation assay. DNAse protection assay proved the stability of the nanocarrier-DNA complex. The functional effect of the nanocarriers to sensitize cell death represents a safe non-viral vector system for gene therapy.