Nucleic acid vaccines: improving the efficiency and delivery mechanism

Nucleic acid delivery carriers for gene therapy are of high interest, however barriers along the delivery system route can be deemed the culprit to low efficiency. In an attempt to achieve more efficient vaccine delivery, we developed and designed a series of novel transfection agents using lipopeptides and plasmid DNA. These transfection agents were optimised and evaluated for their performance in cells and in animal models. We developed two types of delivery complexes and investigated transfection efficiency of positively charged complexes in cells and neutral or near negatively charged complexes in mice. We also evaluated immune response generated by these neutral or near negative complexes in mice models.