The gene therapy of cancer, due to the limit of its efficiency and safety, has not been widely used in clinical. Recently, bacterial magnetic particles (BMPs), which are membrane-bound nanocrystals found in magnetotactic bacteria, have been exploited as a new gene delivery system. However, its application on gene therapy remains to be explored. In our previous study, we found that a combination of cecropin B (ABPs) and apoptin (VP3) could serve as an effective gene therapeutic agent. Thus, in this study, we used BMPs to deliver the co-expression plasmid of these two gene, namely pVAX1-VA, and evaluated its therapeutic effect on human hepatocellular carcinoma (HepG2). Our results showed that BMPs significantly improved the efficiency of gene transfection (almost 3-fold than Lipofectamine 2000 at 48 h, P < .001), which led to stronger apoptosis (in a peak almost 2-fold than Lipofectamine 2000-pVAX1-VA, P < .01) and growth inhibition of HepG2 cells. More importantly, compared with Lipofectamine 2000-pVAX1-VA group, BMP-pVAX1-VA strikingly inhibited tumor growth (0.60 +/- 0.09 g vs. 0.88 +/- 0.11 g, P < .05) in nude mouse tumor models and increased the tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes considerably without apparent cytotoxicity. These findings suggest that BMPs could be an attractive gene delivery system for gene therapy and provide a potential available treatment for human hepatocellular carcinoma and maybe some other kinds of tumors. (C) 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.