Self-Assembly of Peptide–Lipid Nanoparticles for the Efficient Delivery of Nucleic Acids

A transfection formulation is successfully developed to deliver nucleic acids by adding an auxiliary lipid (DOTAP) to the peptide, and the transfection efficiency of pDNA reaches 72.6%, which is close to Lipofectamine 2000. In addition, the designed KHL peptide–DOTAP complex exhibits good biocompatibility by cytotoxicity and hemolysis analysis. The mRNA delivery experiment indicates that the complex had a 9- or 10-fold increase compared with KHL or DOTAP alone. Intracellular localization shows that KHL/DOTAP can achieve good endolysosomal escape. Our design provides a new platform for improving the transfection efficiency of peptide vectors.