Widespread gene transfer to malignant gliomas with In vitro-to-In vivo correlation

Gene therapy of malignant gliomas has shown a lack of clinical success to date due in part to inability of conventional gene vectors to achieve widespread gene transfer throughout highly disseminated tumor areas within the brain. Here, we demonstrate that newly engineered polymer-based DNA-loaded nanoparticles (DNA-NP) possessing small particle diameters (similar to 50 nm) and non-adhesive surface polyethylene glycol (PEG) coatings efficiently penetrate brain tumor tissue as well as healthy brain parenchyma. Specifically, this brain-penetrating nanoparticle (BPN), following intracranial administration via convection enhanced delivery (CED), provides widespread transgene expression in heathy rodent striatum and an aggressive brain tumor tissue established orthotopically in rats. The ability of BPN to efficiently traverse both tissues is of great importance as the highly invasive glioma cells infiltrated into normal brain tissue are responsible for tumor recurrence. Of note, the transgene expression within the orthotopic tumor tissue occurred preferentially in glioma cells over microglial cells. We also show that three-dimensional (3D) multicellular spheroids established with malignant glioma cells, unlike conventional two-dimensional (2D) cell cultures, serve as an excellent in vitro model reliably predicting gene vector behaviors in vivo. Briefly, DNA-NP possessing greater surface PEG coverage exhibited more uniform and higher-level transgene expression both in the 3D model and in vivo, whereas the trend was opposite in 2D culture. The finding here alerts that gene transfer studies based primarily on 2D cultures should be interpreted with caution and underscores the relevance of 3D models for screening newly engineered gene vectors prior to their in vivo evaluation.