Purpose. Development of effective and selective intracellular gene transport systems for the creation of drugs for gene therapy of hereditary and cancerous diseases.
Application area. Medicine. Medicine manufacturing.
Advantages. Compared to commercial vectors, calixarene amphiphiles are less toxic and, due to the small size of the supramolecular complexes formed from DNA, have more opportunities for cell transfection.
Description. Amphiphilic positively charged calixarenes form micelles capable of forming nanosized (d = 40–100 nm) supramolecular complexes with different types of DNA. Such complexes pass through biological membranes and deliver DNA molecules into cells, in particular cancer cells, where the released DNA triggers the biosynthesis of the peptide they encode in the cell nucleus.