© DYN3D/ISTOCKPHOTO.COMBy default, Bill Marshall is in the replication business. His actual business is developing microRNA therapeutics as the cofounder and head of the Boulder, Colorado–based biotech firm miRagen Therapeutics. But because his company is always on the lookout for new approaches, he often finds himself attempting to replicate published research to see if it can be commercialized. “We do this a lot,” he says. “We count on academic investigators in the literature to provide interesting leads.”
One such lead popped up in 2012 in a study by Chen-Yu Zhang of Nanjing University and colleagues about the cross-kingdom transfer of microRNA from plants to mammals. Essentially, the paper showed that a microRNA in rice could regulate genes in the liver of mice that had eaten the rice (Cell Research, 22:107-26, 2012). “It was a huge thing,” Marshall recalls. Immediately, thoughts of transgenic, therapeutic crops came to mind, and his team set about trying to reproduce the results.
But Marshall’s group, in collaboration with scientists from Monsanto, was unsuccessful in reproducing Zhang’s results, and the researchers concluded that the published findings must have resulted from a nutritional imbalance as a result of the experimental diet fed to the mice. Although Marshall had contacted ...
