Ultrasound gene therapy: On the road from concept to reality

The promise of gene therapy Lies in the potential to ameliorate or cure con ditions that are resistant to conventional therapeutic approaches. Progress in vascular and all other fields of gene therapy has been hampered by conc erns over the safety and practicality of recombinant viral vectors and the inefficiency of current nonviral transfection techniques. This review summa rizes the increasing evidence that exposure of eukaryotic cells to relative ly modest intensity ultrasound, within, the range emitted by diagnostic tra nsducers, either alone or in combination with other nonviral techniques, ca n enhance transgene expression by up to several orders of magnitude over na ked DNA alone. In combination with the flexibility and excellent clinical s afety profile of therapeutic and diagnostic ultrasound, these data suggest that ultrasound-assisted gene delivery has great promise as a novel approac h to improve the efficiency of many forms of nonviral gene delivery.