Chitosan as a non-viral co-transfection system in a cystic fibrosis cell line

Successful gene therapy requires the development of suitable vehicles for the selective and efficient delivery of genes to specific target cells at the expense of minimal toxicity. In this work, we investigated a non-viral gene delivery system based on chitosan (CS) to specifically address cystic fibrosis (CF). Thus, electrostatic self-assembled CS-pEGFP and CS-pEGFP-siRNA complexes were prepared from high-pure fully characterized CS (Mw ∼ 20 kDa and degree of acetylation ∼ 30%). The average diameter of positively-charged complexes (i.e. ζ ∼+25 mV) was ∼ 200 nm. The complexes were found relatively stable over 14h in Opti-MEM. Cell viability study did not show any significant cytotoxic effect of the CS-based complexes in a human bronchial cystic fibrosis cell line (CFBE41o-). We evaluated the transfection efficiency of this cell line with both CS-pEGFP and co-transfected with CS-pEGFP-siRNA complexes at (N/P) charge ratio of 12. We reported an increase in the fluorescence intensity of CS-pEGFP and a reduction in the cells co-transfected with CS-pEGFP-siRNA. This study shows proof-of-principle that co-transfection with chitosan might be an effective delivery system in a human CF cell line. It also offers a potential alternative to further develop therapeutic strategies for inherited disease treatments, such as CF.