Design, synthesis, and evaluation of gadolinium cationic lipids as tools for biodistribution studies of gene delivery complexes.

Gadolinium-chelating cationic lipids have been synthesized to obtain lipoplexes with MRI contrast properties. These compounds were designed to follow the biodistribution of synthetic DNA for gene delivery by nuclear magnetic resonance imaging. The lipid MCO-I-68 was synthesized, and chelate complexes with gadolinium were formed and characterized in terms of physicochemical and DNA binding properties.