Engineering a polymeric gene delivery vector based on poly(ethylenimine) and hyaluronic acid.

In this work, the effects of primary amines, ligand targeting, and overall charge on the effectiveness of branched poly(ethylenimine)-hyaluronic acid conjugate (bPEI-HA) zwitterionic gene delivery vectors are investigated. To elucidate the relative importance of each of these parameters, we explored the zeta potential, cytotoxicity, and transfection efficiency for a variety of formulations of bPEI-HA. It was found that the length of the hyaluronic acid (HA) oligosaccharide had the most significant effect on cytotoxicity and transfection efficiency with human mesenchymal stem cells.