Delivery of phosphodiester oligonucleotides: can DOTAP/DOPE liposomes do the trick?

Delivering phosphodiester ONs (PO-ONs) remains an attractive but challenging goal in antisense therapy. Both in the literature and in our experiments, most cationic liposomes fail in generating an antisense effect with PO-ONs, while they succeed with chemically modified ONs such as phosphothioate ONs (PS-ONs). This work aims to explain the biological activity of PO- and PS-ONs delivered by DOTAP/DOPE liposomes based on a detailed understanding of their cell biological behavior by means of fluorescence correlation spectroscopy and confocal laser scanning microscopy. We conclude that DOTAP/DOPE liposomes are not suited to deliver PO-ONs due to the release of naked PO-ONs in the cytosol at the time of the endosomal escape of the liposomes and the subsequent rapid degradation of the naked PO-ONs. Carriers that would not release the PO-ONs upon endosomal escape but would continue to carry the PO-ONs until they arrive at the target mRNA could therefore be better suited to delivering PO-ONs. In the case of PS-ONs, the ONs are not degraded upon release at the time of the endosomal escape of the liposomes, creating a pool of intact, biologically active PS-ONs and thus making DOTAP/DOPE liposomes mainly suitable for delivering nuclease resistant ONs. However, the cells seemed to display an export pathway for removing intact PS-ONs from the cells, limiting the presence of naked PS-ONs in the nucleus to approximately 8 h following the delivery.