siRNA therapeutics can reduce off-target side effects of anticancer drugs

Reviewed by James Ives, M.Psych. (Editor)Jul 9 2020

Announcing a new article published for the BIO Integration journal. In this review article the authors Shuwen Cao, Chunhao Lin, Shunung Liang, Chee Hwee Tan, Xiaoding Xu, and Phei Er Saw from Sun Yatsen University, Guangzhou, China and Guangzhou University of Chinese Medicine, Guangzhou, China consider enhancing chemotherapy by RNA interference.

Small interfering RNA (siRNA) has shown tremendous potential for treating human diseases in the past decades. siRNA can selectively silence a pathological pathway through the targeting and degradation of a specific mRNA, significantly reducing the off-target side effects of anticancer drugs.

However, the poor pharmacokinetics of RNA significantly restricted the clinical use of RNAi technology.

In this review, the authors examine in-depth the siRNA therapeutics currently in preclinical and clinical trials, multiple challenges faced in siRNA therapy, the feasibility of siRNA treatment with anticancer drugs in combined with siRNA in nanoparticles or modified to be parental drugs, sequential therapy of siRNA treatment prior to drug treatment with siRNA and drugs loaded in nanoparticles.

The combinatorial activation of apoptosis by different pathways, namely Bcl-2, survivin, and Pgp protein was focused on.

Taken together, this review serves to establish the pathway of effective and efficient combination therapy of siRNA and drugs as a new strategy.

BIO Integration is a fully open access journal that will allow for the rapid dissemination of multidisciplinary views driving the progress of modern medicine. Article reference: Shuwen Cao, Chunhao Lin, Shunung Liang, Chee Hwee Tan, Xiaoding Xu, and Phei Er Saw, Enhancing Chemotherapy by RNA Interference. BIO Integration, 2020.

As part of its mandate to help bring interesting work and knowledge from around the world to a wider audience, BIOI will actively support authors through open access publishing and through waiving author fees in its first years.

Also, publication support for authors whose first language is not English will be offered in areas such as manuscript development, English language editing, and artwork assistance.