Nanosecond electroporation: another look.

As the medical field moves from treatment of diseases with drugs to treatment with genes, safe and efficient gene delivery systems are needed to make this transition. One such safe, non-viral, and efficient gene delivery system is electroporation (electrogenetherapy). Exciting discoveries using electroporation could make this technique applicable to drug and vaccine delivery in addition to gene delivery. Typically milli and microsecond pulses have been used for electroporation. Recently, the use of nanosecond electrical pulses (10-300 ns) at very high magnitudes (10-300 kV/cm) has been studied for direct DNA transfer to the nucleus in vitro. This article reviews the work done using high-intensity nanosecond pulses, termed as nanosecond electroporation (nsEP), in electroporation gene delivery systems.