Henrique Faneca

University of Coimbra, Portugal

Title: Lipid- and Polymer-based nanosystems for gene delivery

---

Biography

Henrique Faneca obtained his master degree in Cell Biology in 2001 and a Ph.D. degree in Biochemistry in 2005 at University of Coimbra. He is Principal Investigator, under the FCT Investigator Program, at Center for Neuroscience and Cell Biology (CNC), University of Coimbra, since November 2016, leading the research group: Nanosystems and targeted antitumor strategies. The activity of his research group is essentially focused on the development and characterization of nanosystems that allow an efficient and specific delivery of therapeutic agents into target cells, and in the generation of new multitarget antitumor strategies, such as those involving the combination of gene therapy and chemotherapy.

Abstract

Cancer is one of the major causes of death, since conventional available treatments, in most of the cases, do not allow a cure of the disease. The lack of effective and well-tolerated cancer treatments highlights the urgent need for the development of new therapeutic approaches, such as those involving the combination of gene therapy and chemotherapy. However, there are several obstacles that limit its clinical application, namely the barriers that genetic material has to surpass to reach the final target. In this regard, one of our main goals is to develop nanosystems to efficiently mediate antitumor strategies.

We have developed several cationic liposomes- and cationic polymers-based formulations. Regarding the cationic liposomes-based nanosystems, our results showed that the association of ligands such as asialofetuin to cationic liposomes, promotes a substantial increase in their transfection activity both in vitro and in vivo. The biological activity obtained with these lipoplexes was much higher than that observed with highly efficient commercial formulations and is due to their specific interaction with the asialoglycoprotein receptor. Regarding the cationic polymers-based nanosystems, our data demonstrated that the best mixtures between PDMAEMA and P?AE homopolymers presented a much higher transfection activity, in the presence of serum, than that obtained with bPEI-based or block copolymer-based polyplexes. Regarding the physicochemical properties, the developed nanosystems presented high protection of genetic material and reduced sizes, which are suitable features for in vivo applications.

Our data show that the developed nanosystems present a noticeable ability to efficiently deliver genetic material into target cells, even in the presence of serum, consequently constituting new platforms to mediate gene therapy-based antitumor strategies.