The development of biocompatible, non-toxic, and highly effective gene delivery vectors holds great promise for curing many genetic and rare diseases. Modification of cationic polymers with sugar residues to generate cationic glycopolymers is an attractive strategy for introducing physiological stability into cationic polymers. Novel carbohydrate-containing polymeric vectors, termed glycopolymers, offer the advantages of enhanced biocompatibility, colloidal stability, and tissue-specific targeting. The development of these polymers has largely advanced the field of gene therapy.

Advances in chemistry and polymer chemistry have provided facile synthesis methods with ideal yields to produce cationic glycopolymers with well-defined and desired morphologies, allowing for the determination of structure-activity relationships. This information on structure-activity relationships has significance for the development of efficient polymer-based gene delivery vectors for non-viral gene therapies and gene editing technologies such as CRISPR/Cas9.

Fig. 1 (A) Structure of MAGalNAc-based diblock glycopolymers. (B) Plasmid-based polyplexes formed with MAGalNAc diblock copolymers promote the transfection of mouse liver tissue. (Van Bruggen C, et al., 2019)