Lay Summary Cancer is a serious and common ...

Lay Summary
Cancer is a serious and common health problem leading to one in eight deaths worldwide. It is currently treated with a combination of surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy; costing the NHS £billions every year. However these conventional treatments for cancer are not particularly effective and have a number of serious side effects.
Cancer is characterised by the uncontrolled growth and spread of abnormal cells caused by abnormalities in the genetic material of the transformed cells.
Genetic abnormalities found in cancer typically affect two general classes of genes. Cancer-promoting oncogenes are typically activated in cancer cells, giving those cells new properties, such as hyperactive growth and division, protection against programmed cell death, loss of respect for normal tissue boundaries, and the ability to become established in diverse tissue environments.
As research develops, treatments are becoming more specific for different varieties of cancer. There has been significant progress in the development of targeted therapy drugs that act specifically on detectable molecular abnormalities in certain tumors, and which minimize damage to normal cells.
Antisense oligonucleotide drugs are one of the newer areas of drug development. This technology offers researchers the ability to target almost any cellular process with complete specificity. If a protein is helping a cancer cell to grow, then the appropriate antisense oligonucleotide could be used to prevent that protein from ever being made. Because antisense oligonucleotides are so specific, it is unlikely that any other protein in the body would be affected. This specificity should result in a reduction of the side effects often seen with conventional cancer treatments.
Our genes consist of long strings of nucleotides along the double stranded DNA in our chromosomes. When there is a requirement for any particular gene to be expressed, the process of transcription leads to the production of a single stranded messenger RNA (mRNA) molecule from that gene which is subsequently translated to form a protein. Like DNA molecules, mRNA molecules are capable of binding to complementary nucleic acid strands.
Antisense oligonucleotides are synthetic single stranded strings of nucleic acid bases designed with a sequence complementary to a sequence for a given mRNA. When administered they can enter cells and bind to their target mRNA leading to an inactivation of the mRNA and therefore its inhibition to protein. They work in a number of ways to bound mRNA is not suitable for translation and is degraded. Antisense oligonucleotide therapy is very specific, thereby often reducing the side effects of the drug. The treatment involves binding and deactivating specific strands of mRNA that code for a protein that is involved with cancer.
The full mechanism of this inactivation is not entirely understood, but it may be related to the fact that double ...