Lipidoids Could Deliver RNAi Treatments Directly to Cancer
Scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, Inc (NASDAQ: ALNY) have discovered a method which makes it possible to deliver powerful RNA interference (RNAi) therapies directly to the precise location where cancer or viral infections are developing.
RNAi therapies are designed to turn on and off disease-causing genes. Early RNAi studies suggest they have potential for treating a variety of diseases, but further research has been difficult because scientists lacked an effective way to safely deliver the drugs to the targeted tissues.
The team from MIT and Alnylam came up with a technique which allows the high speed production of lipid-like molecules, known as lipidoids. These nanoscale lipidoids are capable of delivering customized RNAi drugs directly to malignant or infected cells.
The lipidoids were already successfully tested in mice, rats, and cynomolgus monkeys and the team hopes to test them in human clinical trials within the next few years. As the study’s senior author said,
“RNA interference is a tool that has a lot of people excited, and one reason for the excitement is that we hope it will provide a new method to control almost any gene in your body.”
Dr Daniel Anderson
David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, MIT
If you’d like to learn more about this discovery, the team’s work has been published as the cover story of the April 2008 edition of Nature Biotechnology.
Source: MIT News
Related Link: Technology Review
Technorati Tags: oncology; targeted chemotherapy; nanotechnology; nanomedicine
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