101–110 of 115 posts
Plants don't have an immune system per-say but they do actively defend against double stranded RNA.
This is a very interesting and novel technique, but it brings to mind a very interesting and (to my knowledge) still very much open question in human biology: just what all does RNA do? Obviously, we know quite a lot about RNAs such as mRNA, tRNA, and rRNA, but until the later part of the 1990s it would have been nearly impossible to predict such things as snRNA, snoRNA, siRNA, miRNA, and RNAi. Then there's the quest…
Edit: that is to say, they don't encode any proteins - they simply loop back on each other and the shape does all the work.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds like a perfect beginning to a real "I am Legend" scenario. Imagine someone releasing a virus that could cross the blood-brain barrier (modified Rabies?) that just infects the cells and causes some minor symptoms that appear to be a standard cold. But anyone who takes this drug will have those brain cells self-destruct right?
If you could infect a target with a designer virus, why not just make it kill them directly? Unless you're the villain in a James Bond movie, of course ;)
Go to kickstarter or some other funding method that will NOT patent or copyright this. Something like the JOBS acts would provide. This is too disruptive to have in the hands of big pharma.
Kickstarter isn't going to provide the hundreds of millions of dollars it costs to take a drug through the FDA approval process.
Well, it'll certainly get them closer.
This is a very interesting and novel technique, but it brings to mind a very interesting and (to my knowledge) still very much open question in human biology: just what all does RNA do? Obviously, we know quite a lot about RNAs such as mRNA, tRNA, and rRNA, but until the later part of the 1990s it would have been nearly impossible to predict such things as snRNA, snoRNA, siRNA, miRNA, and RNAi. Then there's the quest…
Not to mention viroids - tightly balled RNAs of only a few hundred (220!) nucleotides which, due to the shape they form, coerce replication machinery to reproduce them. Definitely on the very edge of what can be considered "alive". Edit: that is to say, they don't encode any proteins - they simply loop back on each other and the shape does all the work.
For what it's worth, I think this will be the mechanism for majority of gene based drug delivery in 10 years.
Good rule of thumb: if the title is a question, the answer is no.
Go to kickstarter or some other funding method that will NOT patent or copyright this. Something like the JOBS acts would provide. This is too disruptive to have in the hands of big pharma.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not to mention viroids - tightly balled RNAs of only a few hundred (220!) nucleotides which, due to the shape they form, coerce replication machinery to reproduce them. Definitely on the very edge of what can be considered "alive". Edit: that is to say, they don't encode any proteins - they simply loop back on each other and the shape does all the work.
The shape is more important as a container, transporting other silencing RNA or miRNA. People have developed nano cages that act as slippery shells to deliver a payload, and so far some insanely promising results in mammalian cells. For what it's worth, I think this will be the mechanism for majority of gene based drug delivery in 10 years.
Go to kickstarter or some other funding method that will NOT patent or copyright this. Something like the JOBS acts would provide. This is too disruptive to have in the hands of big pharma.
Kickstarter isn't going to provide the hundreds of millions of dollars it costs to take a drug through the FDA approval process.
The difficulty, of course, is convincing the donors that the likelihood of success is high; with a video game from a reputable publisher, it's near 1, whereas it's much lower for an experimental drug. But the potential gain is certainly many orders of magnitude greater.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The shape is more important as a container, transporting other silencing RNA or miRNA. People have developed nano cages that act as slippery shells to deliver a payload, and so far some insanely promising results in mammalian cells. For what it's worth, I think this will be the mechanism for majority of gene based drug delivery in 10 years.
Oh really? cool. It's been a while since I read anything about viroids. They somehow bundle miRNAs?
Imagine a very small 3d hotpocket that can deliver small siRNA or miRNA. Even better, you can program a signal amplification or another message into the structure itself, e.g. joining other structures to form lock-key mechanisms like legos.