RNA Therapeutics and Disease: A New Frontier in Medicine
A special issue of Molecules (ISSN 1420-3049). This special issue belongs to the section "Macromolecular Chemistry".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (10 February 2024) | Viewed by 16994
Special Issue Editors
Interests: aptamers; cancer; targeted delivery; SELEX
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
The boost of high-throughput technologies in the last decade has revealed a plethora of unexpected RNAs with no obvious coding capacities, termed noncoding RNAs (ncRNAs). This noncoding transcription, for a long time deemed to be nothing more than “transcriptional noise”, has been demonstrated to play critical roles across multiple biological pathways through a variety of different mechanisms—for instance, by regulating chromatin modifications, or by affecting mRNA stability and translation. Long and short ncRNAs regulate gene expression at almost every step. The revolution in RNA biology and the introduction of novel RNA-based gene editing approaches (i.e., CRISPR) have ushered in the new era of RNA therapeutics. These molecules mimic or antagonize the function of natural existing ncRNAs.
By tapping into RNA biology, RNA-based drugs are emerging as an innovative, precise, and broad approach for the treatment of pathological conditions such as hepatic viruses, liver-centric genetic diseases, cancer, cardiometabolic or neurological disorders, and, more recently, as a novel platform for vaccine development. Hence, RNA-based drugs hold promise to expand the domain of “druggable” targets beyond that of conventional small molecules and biologics.
This Special Issue aims at elucidating the latest advances in RNA Therapeutics (including small interfering RNAs (siRNAs), microRNAs (miRs)/antimiRs, mRNA, antisense oligonucleotides (ASO), aptamers, and CRISPR-based approaches) in diseases. We welcome the submission of both original research and review articles discussing the state-of-the-art of RNA-based drugs with potential clinical benefits in areas related to cancer, immunotherapy, neurology, metabolic disorders, and infectious diseases.
Dr. Annalisa Di Ruscio
Dr. Carla Lucia Esposito
Guest Editors
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Keywords
- RNA therapeutics
- RNA biology
- Cancer
- Immunotherapy
- Acquired and inherited neurological conditions
- Metabolic disorders
- Infectious disease
- Vaccine
- COVID-19
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