RNAi Inches Toward the Clinic

Courtesy of Cenix BioScience (S. Doering)When Andrew Fire of the Carnegie Institution in Washington, DC, set out to understand some confusing results obtained with antisense RNA in 1998,1 he could not have known he was firing the opening salvo in a biotech revolution. What he stumbled upon was a potent and simple way to knock down gene expression in eukaryotic cells called RNA interference, or RNAi.Researchers in academia and industry alike hitched their wagons to RNAi's star, and in the years f

Amy Adams

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Courtesy of Cenix BioScience (S. Doering)

When Andrew Fire of the Carnegie Institution in Washington, DC, set out to understand some confusing results obtained with antisense RNA in 1998,¹ he could not have known he was firing the opening salvo in a biotech revolution. What he stumbled upon was a potent and simple way to knock down gene expression in eukaryotic cells called RNA interference, or RNAi.

Researchers in academia and industry alike hitched their wagons to RNAi's star, and in the years following its discovery, the number of papers on RNAi jumped from 15 in 1998 to nearly 1,000 in 2003. Corporations changed direction in midstream, jumping from disappointing projects based on ribozyme and antisense RNA to projects dealing with RNAi. One company, Ribozyme Pharmaceuticals in Boulder, Colo., even rechristened itself Sirna Therapeutics to reflect its new vision. Science named RNAi the technology of the year for 2002, and ...

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