The Effect of SPIO Nanoparticles Size on Transduction of PEGylated Lentiviral Vector

Gene editing has revealed many promising opportunities for the treatment of severe diseases including cancers and autoimmunes. There are two main routes for gene delivery: viral and non-viral. Recent research shows viral methods are very close to clinical trials. Nevertheless, there are a couple of obstacles to remove such as difficulty in virus concentration, low efficiency of transduction, and being time-consuming. In this work, by employing magnetic nanoparticles (NP) we tried to solve these problems. Conjugating these nanoparticles to viruses by polyethylene glycol (PEG) can increase sedimentation of viruses due to magnetic and gravity forces even without ultracentrifuge. Moreover, this magnetic force can guide viruses toward cells and tremendously facilitate the transduction process. Nanoparticle size has significant effects and should be considered for this application. As shown, average size nanoparticles revealed the best performance especially in combination with salting-out precipitation and increased transduction efficiency more than 20-fold.