Anti-HIV therapy with antisense oligonucleotides and ribozymes: realistic approaches or expensive myths?

2 Antisense Inhibition Oligonucleotides , Ribozymes , and siRNAs

Anti-genes: siRNA, ribozymes and antisense.

Scientists have been working on strategies to selectively turn off specific genes in diseased tissues for the past thirty years. In the 1980's, oligodeoxynucleotides (ODNs) with unique chemistries were tested with model systems both in vitro and in vivo with varying degrees of success. In the 1990's, ribozymes with both antisense and catalytic properties were successfully introduced to the fiel...

Nucleic Acid Therapeutics: Current Targets For Antisense Oligonucleotides And Ribozymes

Nucleic acids are becoming increasingly important as therapeutic molecules mainly for the ease with which specificity for a vast range of targets of these drugs is achieved. Yet the dose rates of several mg/kg are not easy to provide. Reform of drug policy has been suggested earlier to facilitate newer therapeutic strategies to be put to use. With the current technology, each mg of the unmodifi...

Assessment of an anti-HIV-1 combination gene therapy strategy using the antisense RNA and multimeric hammerhead ribozymes.

A combination gene therapy strategy using an ASPsi-gag antisense RNA (targeted against the packaging signal and the gag-coding region) and a multimeric hammerhead ribozyme Rz1-9 (targeted against nine sites within the env-coding region) or Rz1-14 (targeted against 14 sites within the 5' leader and the pro-, pol-, vif- and env-coding regions) was assessed for inhibiting HIV-1 replication. A muri...

Theoretical and experimental approaches to design effective antisense oligonucleotides.

Among the large number of possible antisense oligonucleotides (asODN) against a given target nucleic acid, only a small number of species seems to give rise to satisfactorily strong inhibition of target gene expression in living cells. Therefore much attention is paid to strategies that help to successfully design effective asODN. Here, selected experimental approaches and theoretical concepts ...