Uniform iron oxide nanoparticles reduce the required amount of polyethylenimine in the gene delivery to mesenchymal stem cells

Cationic polyethylenimine (PEI) is regarded as the “golden standard” of non-viral gene vectors. However, the superiority of PEI with high positive charge density also induces its major drawback of cytotoxicity, which restricts its application for an effective and safe gene delivery to stem cells. To redress this shortcoming, herein, a magnetic gene complex containing uniform iron oxide nanoparticles (UIONPs), plasmid DNA, and free PEI is prepared through electrostatic interactions for the gene delivery to bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells (BM-MSCs). Results show that UIONPs dramatically promote the gene delivery to BM-MSCs using the assistance of magnetic force. In addition, decreasing the free PEI nitrogen to DNA phosphate (N/P) ratio from 10 to 6 has little adverse impact on the transgene expression levels (over 300 times than that of PEI alone at the N/P ratio of 6) and significantly reduces the cytotoxicity to BM-MSCs. Further investigations confirmed that the decrease of free PEI has little influence on the cellular uptake after applying external magnetic forces, but that the reduced positive charge density decreases the cytotoxicity. The present study demonstrates that the magnetic gene delivery not only contributes to the enhanced gene delivery efficiency but also helps to reduce required amount of PEI, providing a potential strategy for an efficient and safe gene delivery to stem cells.