Despite Challenges RNAi-based Therapies Have Made Huge Progress, says New Report

Nov. 11, 2009 - PRLog -- Piribo, the online destination for business intelligence for the biotech and pharmaceutical industry, has added a new report analysing partnering agreements in diagnostics.

“Delivering RNAi-Based Therapeutics & Diagnostics: Challenges & Opportunities”, which is available at bit.ly/4hSRfd, reports that over the last decade, tremendous advances have been made in the field of RNAinterference (RNAi), a naturally occurring mechanism for gene regulation. Researchers have begun to unravel the underlying mechanisms of gene silencing and along the way a number of new gene silencing agents have been uncovered such as microRNAs.

The 225 page report assesses the commercial potential of RNAi-based therapies in all of the key therapeutic areas: cancer, CNS disorders, viral infectious diseases, ocular diseases, cardiovascular, metabolic and other conditions.

Furthermore it shows that several novel RNAi-based therapeutics are expected to be launched in the next ten years as companies have made significant advances in identifying, characterising, designing and delivering gene silencing agents to a variety of target tissues.

Whilst RNAi has become a useful tool for understanding the function of specific genes and a means of identifying new targets for small molecule intervention, many scientists have harnessed its power to develop RNAi-based therapeutics, which can treat and in some cases prevent disease and have expanded the repertoire of targets previously deemed 'undruggable'.

In addition, a second generation of RNAi therapeutics, dicer substrate RNA (disRNA), have been discovered that act higher up the RNAi pathway than siRNAs and use endogenous enzymes to process them into siRNAs. Interestingly, this new class of RNA-based therapeutics appear to be more potent and have a longer duration of action than their siRNA counterparts.

However, this field is still in its infancy and the full potential of RNA-based therapeutics has yet to be realised. To date, no RNAi-based therapeutic has been approved, although several products are in clinical development.

“Delivering RNAi-Based Therapeutics & Diagnostics: Challenges & Opportunities” is available from Piribo. For more information go to: http://www.piribo.com/publications/therapeutic/delivering...

Piribo product ID: PAV00007

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About Piribo.
Piribo (http://www.piribo.com/publications/therapeutic/index.html) is a UK-based independent online store supplying business information on the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries. The website now carries over 17,000 English language titles including, market reports, studies and books and is the UK’s largest online biopharma information store. Subscribers receive a free monthly newsletter and email alerts on new titles in their areas of interest. The company was established in 2004.