ABSTRACT
Gene therapy is a method of treatment for several genetic and acquired diseases by replacing defective genes, substituting missing genes, or silencing unwanted gene expression (Kabanov and Kabanov 1995). Although gene therapy is regarded as a promising therapeutic approach, the method still lacks an efcient and safe delivery system or vector that delivers therapeutic genes to a specic target tissue or organ selectively and efciently with minimal toxicity (Li and Huang 2000). Although viral vectors have been commonly used in the majority of clinical trials due to their high transfection efciency and capability of inducing long-term gene expression, they have several drawbacks such as immunogenicity, potential infectivity, complicated production, and inammation (Somia and Verma 2000).
