Vascular smooth muscle proliferative diseases, including atherosclerosis and restenosis, are among the leading causes of morbidity and mortality in the US. Gene therapy may represent an important alternative for the treatment and prevention of these proliferative diseases of the vasculature. It can be highly cell-specific, mimic or restore normal in vivo function, and can be permanent or transient depending on vector design. Currently, a number of gene delivery systems for use on the arterial wall are being studied, but as yet their low efficiency in gene transfer and lack of cell-specific targeting and expression are major limitations. According to Dr. David Dean, "The benefit of our newly described approach is that it can target specific cell types. One of the most commonly envisioned treatments for these proliferative disorders is to deliver genes that kill or inhibit the dividing smooth muscle cells, but we need to target only these muscle cells and not any other cell in the vessel wall and this approach will enable us to do just that". The goal of the team is to design more effective gene therapy vectors for use in the vasculature by understanding the molecular mechanisms by which DNA and DNA-protein complexes are actively transported into the nucleus. Dr. Warren Zimmer states "these results set the stage for our future use of this technology to deliver therapeutic genes to lessen the severity of restenosis which is the most common issue following angioplasty and placement of stents". Dr. Dean continues, "Now that we have demonstrated proof of principle for this approach we can look for DNA sequences that act in other tissues and develop cell-specific treatments for any number of organs". Dr. Steven R. Goodman, Editor-in-Chief of Experimental Biology and Medicine, stated "The exciting studies reported here are the first to demonstrate that non-viral gene delivery can be made cell-specific by controlling the nuclear entry of plasmid DNA, and as such, establishes a new paradigm for cell-selective gene delivery. Drs. Dean, Young, and Zimmer are to be congratulated on this ground-breaking study".