Chapter 9 - Lipid-based nanocarriers for cancer gene therapy

Abstract

Gene therapy is an efficient strategy for the treatment of cancer. This involves the insertion of a corrected gene to target cells to overexpress and replace the defective ones responsible for disease. The delivery of the selective gene to the desired cells has always been a challenging task. Various viral and nonviral gene delivery vectors have been used extensively. Due to inherent toxicities associated with viral vectors, lipid-based nanocarrier systems are getting wider attraction for the delivery of genes to the target sites. Though they have less entrapment efficiency of DNA or genes, still they are preferred as genes delivery systems because of their easy handling, preparation, and various ways to be adopted for target specificity. Most commonly used cationic lipids for developing lipid-based genes delivery systems are Transfectam, lipofectamine, lipofectin, and transfectace. Many cationic lipid-based genes nanocarriers have been studied in preclinical trials and some of them have been successfully qualified for the clinical trials. They are extensively studied so to engineer safe and effective genes delivery tools.