[In vitro and in vivo Magnetofection : a move towards gene therapy]

Gene therapy offers exciting opportunities for the treatment of innate or acquired genetic diseases. However, there is still a need for a safe and efficient strategy to deliver nucleic acids into cells while overcoming the current limitations faced with standard viral vectors. Intensive researches have been carried out over the past decade, focusing both on viral and non-viral (i.e. physical or chemical) strategies. Of these numerous attempts, magnetofection, defined as the combination of nucleic acid vectors with magnetic nanoparticles, holds the promise to achieve high transfection efficiency with reduced toxicity by magnetically focusing the genetic material to be delivered on its cellular target. In vitro as well as in vivo results already demonstrated that this strategy may become a valuable tool towards practical gene therapy.