title: Biological delivery approaches for gene therapy: strategies to potentiate efficacy and enhance specificity.
abstract: Nowadays many therapeutic agents such as suicide genes, anti-angiogenesis agents, cytokines, chemokines and other therapeutic genes were delivered to cancer cells. Various biological delivery systems have been applied for directing therapeutic gene to target cells. Some of these successful preclinical studies, steps forward to clinical trials and a few are examined in phase III clinical trials. In this review, the biological gene delivery systems were categorized into microorganism and cell based delivery systems. Viral, bacterial, yeast and parasite are among microorganism based delivery systems which are expanded in this review. In cell based approach, different strategies such as tumor cells, stem cells, dendritic cells and sertoli cells will be discussed. Different drawbacks are associated with each delivery system; therefore, many strategies have been improved and potentiated their direction toward specific target cells. Herein, further to the principle of each delivery system, the progresses of these approaches for development of newer generation are discussed.
authors.affiliation: Department of Pharmaceutical Biotechnology, School of Pharmacy, Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran.
authors.forename: Elham
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Mohit
authors.forename: Sima
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Rafati
mesh_terms: D060846:Cell Engineering / Q000379:methods* / Q000639:trends; D017690:Cell Transplantation / Q000379:methods* / Q000639:trends; D018014:Gene Transfer Techniques; D015316:Genetic Therapy / Q000379:methods* / Q000639:trends; D005822:Genetic Vectors / Q000145:classification / Q000235:genetics*; D006801:Humans; D016896:Treatment Outcome
keywords: Bacterial vectors; Biological delivery system; Cancer vaccine; DC vaccine and MSCs-based delivery system; Viral vectors