Non-Viral Gene Delivery: From Regenerative Medicine to Cancer Immunotherapy

Date/Time: 19 December 2017, 12:00 PM
Speaker: Stephany Yi Tzeng, Ph.D.
Speaker Affiliation: Research Associate, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland
Venue: John A. Burns School of Medicine, Medical Education Building Auditorium (Room 315)

For more info: Cori Watanabe 808 692-1654
Description: Nucleic acids can encode various types of biologically active proteins, and they can be synthesized easily and inexpensively. This makes them an appealing class of drugs, but for successful application, they must be packaged in delivery vehicles that overcome multiple hurdles to intracellular delivery. An array of poly(beta-amino ester)s (PBAEs) was synthesized and used to form nanoparticles with DNA and siRNA, and they were found to be more effective in transfecting cells than commercial reagents, both in vitro and in vivo. Because our nanoparticles are agnostic of the nucleic acid sequence, this technology can theoretically be used to upregulate or knock down expression of any gene. This seminar will discuss the challenges of nucleic acid delivery, the techniques used in our laboratory to optimize delivery, and selected applications currently being studied. We are particularly interested in the use of DNA and siRNA nanoparticles for cancer targeting and immunotherapy.
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