ABSTRACT
In recent decades, gene therapy is a powerful method in curing a variety of inherited and acquired diseases by replacing defective genes, substituting missing genes, or silencing unwanted gene expression (Kabanov and Kabanov 1995). The lack of effective carriers is a major drawback to progress for clinical applications although most of the gene therapy relies on animal viral vectors because they achieve high efciency of gene transfer in vivo and in clinical trials. However, use of animal viral vectors has several limitations such as immunogenicity, potential infectivity, inammation to the human body, and complicated production (Smith 1995). Therefore, nonviral vectors have been rapidly receiving attention as a gene delivery system because of easy production, low immune response against the vector, and high exibility of size of the delivered gene (Mao et al. 2010). Among nonviral vectors, lipids and polymers are by far the most widely used gene carriers because the
CONTENTS
33.1 Introduction ........................................................................................................................ 657 33.2 Alginate ...............................................................................................................................658
