NCI Seeks Partner for Novel Nucleic-Based Therapy

NCI investigators have developed a solution to address the challenges that nucleic acid based therapeutics face of non-specific delivery and degradation of the nanoparticles. NCI’s solution is an inducible activation nucleic acid hybrid switch. The use of nucleic acid logic elements in these constructs circumvents off-target effects. The systems were optimized to be resistant to nuclease degradation, yet inexpensive for commercial production.

The potential commercial applications for this are very broad and includes cancer, infectious diseases, and genetic disorders. There are numerous competitive advantages to this technology, such as:

• Resistant to nuclease degradation.
• Specificity of action based on environmental context, minimizing off-target effects.
• Amenable to alterations to accommodate different trigger/target sequence pairs without the need for sequence overlap or similarities.
• A set of context sensitive drugs that separate diagnosis (disease state – e.g. over or under expression of particular genes) from the therapeutic state (targeting specific genes – e.g. Dicer substrate RNAs that induce apoptosis).

NCI is looking for innovative companies that are interested in co-developing and/or licensing this technology. For more information, please visit the website here.