“…[96,124] Studies on scaffold-based gene delivery in the lab originally began with the delivery of pDNA including BMP2 [95] and combinations of BMP2 and VEGF [155] utilizing the nHA particles [94] and coll-nHA scaffolds [94,156] developed in-house specifically for bone repair. Having demonstrated the dramatically enhanced therapeutic potential of such systems not only for bone but also cartilage and nerve repair, we also progressed to investigating the utility of alternative gene delivery vectors including PEI, [85,155,157] chitosan, [40,158] Lipofectamine 2000, [75] and cyclodextrin, [75,159] different genetic cargo such as pDNA, [85,95,155,157] miRNA, [96,124] and siRNA, [75,159] and various scaffold types including collagen alone, [85,95] collagennHA, [75,95,96,124,155,159] collagen-HA [85] and collagen hyaluronic acid (coll-HyA) [85] to tailor our systems depending on the final application required. [158] Delivery of the miR-mimics and miR-inhibitors from porous collagen-nHA scaffolds yielded very promising results demonstrating silencing functionality of ≈20% and 88.4%, respectively.…”