The Potential of Nucleic Acid-Based Nanoparticles for Biomedical Application

Abstract

The recent development of biomedical nanotechnology is providing the appropriate know-how to build novel nanocarriers/nanocapsules to be used in the pharmaceutical industry for delivery of drugs and/or therapeutic payloads to specific cells. DNA is an extremely suitable polymer for the generation of nanocapsules being biocompatible, stable and chemically modifiable. Moreover, the simple four bases mechanism allows the auto-assembly of geometrically defined systems. In this review, we describe the general properties of DNA nanocarriers, how they can be functionalized for different tasks, their interaction with cellular systems and we provide an outlook of their use in a therapeutic perspective.