Abstract
In this study, a novel thiolated hyaluronic acid (HA)- polyethylenimine(PEI) copolymer with environmental sensitive functional group wassynthesized, characterized and examined as a potential non-viral genevector. The physical and chemical properties of fabricated gene carrierwere analyzed via 1H NMR and FT-IR for the demonstration of cross-linking of HA with PEI. TNBS assay and Ellman’s reagent wer e con-ducted for the verification of disulfide bond (s-s) formation. Theparticle size and morphology were investigated by dynamic light scat-tering, zeta potential and transmission electron microscopy, respec-tively. The ability of HA-ss-PEI to complex with plasmid DNA wasobserved by gel electrophoresis. Fluorescent microscopy and ELISAspectroscopy was utilized to examine transfection efficiency and pro-tein expression level of therapeutic pDNA. From the results, a novelenvironmental sensitive gene delivery nanocarrier has been success-fully synthesized. HA-ss-PEI (+23.9 mV) complexed with negativelycharged plasmid DNA can be achieved via electrostatic attraction toform a stable spherical nanoparticle of 100 nm in diameter. The nano-carrier could successfully complex with pDNA in the N/P ratio above 3and transfect stem cells to produce specific protein for therapeutic pur-poses. In brief, the environmental sensitive HA-ss-PEI nanoparticles can be used as a promising non-viral gene carrier for therapeutic gene ther-apy in biomedical applications.