Binding assay of human Dectin-1 variants to DNA/β-glucan complex for active-targeting delivery of antisense DNA.

The lectin Dectin-1 is a good target for β-glucan-mediated drug delivery. Although many murine studies of Dectin-1 have been performed, its human analog has not been studied well in terms of being a drug delivery target. We thus analyzed human Dectin-1 cDNA obtained from chronic myelogenous leukemia-derived cells, CML-1, and confirmed the findings of previous studies that there are many isoforms of human Dectin-1 due to exon skipping, although murine Dectin-1 has only two forms. When we transfected the Dectin-1 gene into a non-Dectin-1-expressing cell line and examined cellular uptake of the antisense DNA/β-glucan complex, we confirmed that expression of the target gene was effectively suppressed through β-glucan/Dectin-1-mediated uptake. The present results suggest that the β-glucan complex would be an effective tool to deliver antisense oligonucleotide (AS-ODN) to Dectin-1-expressing cells not only for mice but also for humans.