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Review
. 2021 Jun 14;6(25):16259-16265.
doi: 10.1021/acsomega.1c01755. eCollection 2021 Jun 29.

Liver-Targeted Delivery of Oligonucleotides with N-Acetylgalactosamine Conjugation

Hao Cui  1 , Xinying Zhu  1 , Shuyue Li  1 , Peipei Wang  2   3 , Jianping Fang  4
Affiliations
Review

Liver-Targeted Delivery of Oligonucleotides with N-Acetylgalactosamine Conjugation

Hao Cui et al. ACS Omega. .

Abstract

The potential therapeutic application of oligonucleotides (ONs) that selectively suppress target genes through antisense and RNA interference mechanisms has attracted great attention. The clinical applications of ONs have overcome multiple obstacles and become one of the most active areas for the development of novel therapeutics. To achieve efficient and specific cellular internalization, conjugation of a variety of functional groups to ONs has been the subject of intensive investigations over the past decade. Among them, a promising liver-targeted N-acetylgalactosamine (GalNAc) ligand has been evaluated in multiple preclinical and clinical trials for improving the cellular uptake and tissue specific delivery of ONs. GalNAc-based delivery relies on the fact that liver hepatocytes abundantly and specifically express the asialoglycoprotein receptor that binds and uptakes circulating glycoproteins via receptor-mediated endocytosis. In recent years, encouraging progress has been made in the field of GalNAc conjugates. This review aims to provide an overview of GalNAc-mediated liver-targeted delivery of small interfering RNA and antisense oligonucleotides, and the immense effort as well as recent advances in the development of GalNAc-conjugated agents are described.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no competing financial interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
GalNAc-mediated siRNA and ASO delivery to liver hepatocytes.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Chemistry of registered GalNAc-conjugated ON drugs. (A) Givosiran, (B) lumasiran, (C) inclisiran, and (D) chemical structure of triantennary GalNAc (N-acetylgalactosamine) residues to enable hepatocyte-targeted delivery. SS: sense strand; AS: antisense strand.
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