Engineering biodegradable and multifunctional peptide-based polymers for gene delivery

The complex nature of in vivo gene transfer establishes the need for multifunctional delivery vectors capable of meeting these challenges. An additional consideration for clinical translation of synthetic delivery formulations is reproducibility and scale-up of materials. In this review, we summarize our work over the last five years in developing a modular approach for synthesizing peptide-based polymers. In these materials, bioactive peptides that address various barriers to gene delivery are copolymerized with a hydrophilic backbone of N-(2-hydroxypropyl)methacrylamide (HPMA) using reversible-addition fragmentation chain-transfer (RAFT) polymerization. We demonstrate that this synthetic approach results in well-defined, narrowly-disperse polymers with controllable composition and molecular weight. To date, we have investigated the effectiveness of various bioactive peptides for DNA condensation, endosomal escape, cell targeting, and degradability on gene transfer, as well as the impact of multivalency and polymer architecture on peptide bioactivity.