Sunday, November 30, 2008

“Mirus Bio Announces Delivery Technology Breakthrough for RNAi Therapeutics”

Alex Warren
Blog #3
“Mirus Bio Announces Delivery Technology Breakthrough for RNAi Therapeutics”

Researchers at Mirus Bio Corporation have developed a method for literally turning off genes inside proteins that can cause certain types of cancer, viruses and other types of metabolic diseases. The technique is abbreviated RNAi, which stands for RNA interference. This RNAi is basically a silencing switch they find on proteins that they can ‘switch’ to stop the production of mal-proteins. However, RNAi has not been able to be used inside key cells that could really do damage to the disease, and still has not been engineered to treat inside tumors. The interesting thing here is that, “Mirus researchers have overcome these problems by assembling tiny synthetic molecules, called Dynamic PolyConjugates(TM), that shield their genetic cargo as they home in on target cells.” “The Dynamic PolyConjugates' "cargo" consists of small pieces of genetic material known as small interfering RNA sequences ("siRNA"), which blocks a cell's RNA.” Since the cell’s RNA is blocked, the blueprints for creating proteins never reach the ribosomes, thus terminating the expression for a particular gene. SiRNA’s can be genetically engineered to turn off the expression for any gene for which the sequence is known. Usually, siRNA’s are destroyed naturally by the body before ever reaching the RNA, creating a problem. However, Mirus Bio have coated the siRNA’s with a polymer that “not only protects the siRNA in the bloodstream, but also enables it to break out of a cell's endosome.” This way, it can interact with the mRNA!
Link:http://www.lexisnexis.com/us/lnacademic/results/docview/docview.do?docLinkInd=true&risb=21_T5262502221&format=GNBFI&sort=RELEVANCE&startDocNo=1&resultsUrlKey=29_T5262502227&cisb=22_T5262502226&treeMax=true&treeWidth=0&csi=246798&docNo=1

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