California Institute of Technology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Ghent University researchers are making progress in developing broadly applicable, nanoparticle-enabled siRNA anticancer therapeutics.

They found that siRNA-containing nanoparticles deliver the siRNA to tumors more effectively when the nanoparticle are targeted to the tumor. They also found that the targeted nanoparticles effectively penetrated lung metastases, did not enter liver cells, and showed little immunotoxicity.

Small pieces of nucleic acid, known as siRNAs (short interfering RNAs), can turn off the production of specific proteins, a property that makes them one of the more promising new classes of anticancer drugs in development. At least two siRNA-based anticancer therapies, both delivered to tumors in nanoparticles, have begun human clinical trials.

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