Not to rain on the parade here, but in vivo electroporation is a very well established technology that's been in clinical trials for many years. They have a cool spin on it with their nanochannels, but to be honest I'm skeptical until I see it go head to head against the established technologies in a large animal model. Right now the big barrier to efficacy in humans is scaling up the dose and transfecting sufficient numbers of cells for meaningful protein production.
In the 90s everyone got very excited about DNA therapies but they didn't scale at all into larger species. Then electroporation really revolutionized the field again and we started seeing DNA vaccinations working in humans. But again and again, we've seen that the limiting factor is that nonviral techniques are just not as efficient at spreading their dose around the way viruses do. That's why all the successful CAR-T therapies, to my knowledge, use viral vectors to transform their cells. I'm not sure that shrinking everything down is the right approach, even through nano-anything is the buzzword these days.
I like their approach because they can precisely target a small tissue area, but the applications in humans would appear limited. If you Google "plate and fork electroporation" you can find articles from the early 2000s describing this exact approach except they injected the DNA intradermally instead of allowing it to flow electrophoretically through nanochannels in the top electrode:
Skin-targeted gene transfer using in vivo electroporation
Still, I'm excited to see electroporation making headlines, but temper your expectations. We can transfect an entire mouse muscle and have been doing so for decades now. But who knows, maybe localized wound healing is the best application for this tech?
Source: I am a bioengineer / scientist specializing in drug delivery and I work with many clinical electroporation devices.
