Nanoelectroporation: a first look.

As the medical field moves from treatment of diseases with drugs to treatment with genes, safe and efficient gene delivery systems are needed to make this transition. One such safe, nonviral, and efficient gene delivery system is electroporation (electrogenetherapy). Exciting discoveries by using electroporation could make this technique applicable to drug and vaccine delivery in addition to gene delivery. Typically, milli- and microsecond pulses have been used for electroporation. Recently, the use of nanosecond electric pulses (10-300 ns) at very high magnitudes (10-300 kV/cm) has been studied for direct DNA transfer to the nucleus in vitro. This article reviews the work done using high intensity, nanopulses, termed as nanoelectroporation (nano-EP), in electroporation gene delivery systems.