Towards simple artificial infectious systems

Inefficient gene delivery represents a major obstacle for widespread use of promising approaches in molecular medicine, including human gene therapy, genetic vaccination and gene suppression based on endogenous transcription of antisense RNA, ribozymes or small interfering RNA. We introduce a new concept of gene delivery by exploiting protein transduction. We discuss the feasibility of coupling intercellular spreading of phenotypes and their encoding genotypes in vivo, thus ensuring a compartmental linkage of genes of interest and their gene products, and thereby approaching an artificial infectious system. Such a system can be reduced to a few molecular components, and, hence, contrast with current gene delivery approaches, which incline to higher complexity. Artificial infectious systems can be useful for successive and penetrative tissue targeting.