Peptide-mediated cellular delivery.

Peptide-mediated molecular therapeutic delivery systems have recently emerged as an alternative means to effectively substitute or augment present gene therapy technologies, e.g., TAT, VP22, engineered peptides. These systems show great promise for the elimination of the main bottleneck to safe, efficient, targeted gene therapy delivery and are able to efficiently introduce DNA, antisense peptide nucleic acids, oligonucleotides, small molecules and proteins into cells both in vitro and in vivo. They are versatile and easily designed to incorporate a number of specific attributes required for efficient cargo delivery. A fundamentally new property of these moieties will allow the therapeutic intervention in the biochemistry of the target cell without the need to alter its genome.