Lipoplexes and polyplexes as nucleic acids delivery nanosystems: The current state and future considerations

Designing safe and effective nucleic acid delivery nanosystems presents a challenge that requires a good understanding of various biological barriers, whose impact is frequently neglected during in vitro assessments. Hence, the development of nanosizing non-viral vectors would benefit from a more thorough physicochemical characterization to establish structure-activity relationships and increase the preclinical data relevance.

This review focused on major barriers of lipoplexes and polyplexes by systemic delivery such as blood and immune cells and is aimed to serve as a prescreening tool for the fast and safe development of both non-viral vectors in vivo. An outline of the preclinical assays to be performed under physiological representative conditions, to better account for or even predict the highly dynamic interactions in humans is also given.

The rational design of non-viral vectors has shown promising intracellular uptake results in vitro. Translating in vitro success into clinics has gone with progress, but it is still a difficult task to achieve, and more closely mimicking biological environment in vitro assays of lipoplexes and polyplexes may provide more correlated results to in vivo experiments. Clinical practice would benefit from safer non-viral vectors, particularly when avoiding patients' immune responses and toxicity, which is of major concern.