Self-assembling asymmetric peptide-dendrimer micelles – a platform for effective and versatile in vitro nucleic acid delivery

Despite advancements in the development of high generation cationic-dendrimer systems for delivery of nucleic acid-based therapeutics, commercially available chemical agents suffer from major drawbacks such as cytotoxicity while being laborious and costly to synthesize. To overcome the aforementioned limitations, low-generation cationic peptide asymmetric dendrimers with side arm lipid (cholic and decanoic acid) conjugation were designed, synthesized and systematically screened for their ability to self-assemble into micelles using dynamic light scattering. Cytotoxicity profiling revealed that our entire asymmetric peptide dendrimer library when trialled alone, or as asymmetric dendrimer micelle-nucleic acid complexes, were non-cytotoxic across a broad concentration range. Further, the delivery efficiency of asymmetric peptide dendrimers in H-4-II-E (rat hepatoma), H2K (mdx mouse myoblast), and DAOY (human medulloblastoma) cells demonstrated that cholic acid-conjugated asymmetric dendrimers possess far superior delivery efficiency when compared to the commercial standards, Lipofectamine 2000 or Lipofectin(®).