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This dissertation, BMP2 Gene Delivery Mediated by Chitosan-ss-PEI Non-viral Vector and Investigation of BMP2 Signaling Regulation by Xiaoli, Zhao, 赵晓丽, was obtained from The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong) and is being sold pursuant to Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License. The content of this dissertation has not been altered in any way. We have altered the formatting in order to facilitate the ease of printing and reading of the dissertation. All rights not granted by the above license are retained by the author. Abstract: Osteoporotic fractures are still the major health concerns in many developed societies especially when the incidence of that tremendously increased with the aging population. However, the outcomes of osteoporotic fracture treatment have not been entirely satisfactory due to the poor quality of bone substance. Inspiringly, bone morphogenetic protein 2 (BMP2) with the ability to accelerate bone formation showed advantages over the conventional treatment. The only problem needed to overcome is its short half-life which resulted in the requirement of readministration and extremely high cost. As a solution to that, gene therapy provides a promising way to sustainably release this protein at the regeneration site. Since viral vectors have been hampered by genetic toxicity and immunogenicity, nanoscaled non-viral vectors offer an attractive means for gene delivery. Chitosan as non-viral vector has been widely investigated for its excellent biocompatibility. Most efforts have been given to improve its low transfection efficiency. In this study, chitosan was first modified with octaarginine, one of cell membrane penetrating peptides, and showed enhanced transfection activity, but which was not significant as expected. Following that, low molecular weight polyethyleminine (PEI) was introduced to modify chitosan through bioreducible disulfide linkage, denoted as Chitosan-ss-PEI. PEI is an efficient non-viral vector but hampered by molecular-weight dependent toxicity. The developed Chitosan-ss-PEI showed good biocompatibility in MTT assay in three different cell lines, during which cells were maintained 80% of viability when the concentration of this vector was up to 100 μg/mL. The optimal transfection efficiency of Chitosan-ss-PEI was higher than that of PEI 25k and comparable to Lipofectamine in delivering luciferase reporter gene. GFP expression mediated by Chitosan-ss-PEI also showed similar results. Chitosan-ss-PEI was then applied to deliver BMP2 gene to skeletal system cells and exhibited the osteogenic ability. For C2C12 myoblast cells, this system inhibited their myoblast differentiation and induced the osteogenic differentiation. It also showed stronger effect in promoting the differentiation of immature osteblast-like MG63 cells and in inducing C3H10T1/2 mesenchymal stem cells osteogenic differentiation in term of ALP activity and mineralization ability compared with other commercial available non-viral vectors. Primary MSCs such as bone marrow stromal cells (BMSC) and human umbilical cord blood mesenchymal stem cells (hUCB-MSC), are usually more difficult to transfect, but they showed stronger osteogenic differentiation ability induced by this system comparing with the cell lines. BMP2 usually requires extremely high concentration to realize its function. Through the investigation of BMP2 signaling regulation in this study, it was found that parathyroid hormone (PTH) could increase the access of BMP2 ligands to their receptors by negatively influencing BMPs antagonist network, resulted in enhanced BMP2 activity in bone remodeling and in promoting the commitment of MSC

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