Top quality medical innovation:
Intent on stopping the spread of cancer
siRNAsense is a tiny Norwegian company getting lots of international attention. And it's no wonder: the firm is developing a medicine to prevent the spread of cancer.
CEO Hanne Mette Kristensen and Research Director Mohammed Amarzguioui. (Photo: Bård Gudim)
In a small office in the Oslo Innovation Center sits Hanne Mette Kristensen of the University of Oslo. CEO of the company siRNAsense, she is also half of its total staff. The duo's other half is Research Director Mohammed Amarzguioui, who is where a research director tends to be: in the laboratory doing research.
Despite its unimpressive size in terms of employee count, siRNAsense is no ordinary firm in the biotechnology industry. This company continually receives update requests from large internationals anxious to stay in the know. The reason is that siRNAsense, as its name implies, conducts cutting-edge research and development on siRNA (short interfering RNA) molecules.
Americans Craig Mello and Andrew Fire won the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery that siRNA can regulate, or "turn off", genes through a process called RNA interference. At that point, siRNAsense had already been a company for two years, started up by Bio-Medisinsk Innovasjon AS (BMI), a business incubator for start-up firms that develop prescriptive medicines and diagnostics. siRNAsense is able to draw on BMI's resources as needed, which is what makes it possible to run the firm with such a small staff.
Stopping the spread
In March of last year, siRNAsense was granted funding under the National Programme for Research in Functional Genomics in Norway (FUGE) - the Research Council's largest programme for biotechnology - for a project focused on developing a medicine that can halt the spread of malignant melanoma. So far, the company has succeeded in creating an artificial siRNA molecule resembling the one naturally occurring in cells - but it has been altered so as to target a certain type of tissue factor protein.
Tissue factors are essential in functions such as getting blood to coagulate and creating new blood vessels. In addition, tissue factors are active when cancer cells are spreading throughout the body. This is precisely what the new medicine will be designed to stop. Thus far the company has shown that their artificial molecule stops the spread of cancer in mice. Metastasis, the spread of cancer, is the cause of 90 per cent of all cancer mortalities, so from a medical standpoint, the ability to stop this deadly process would represent an absolutely critical advancement in the treatment of cancer.
"Our medicine can prevent the cancer cells that circulate throughout the body from attaching to the membranes of other cells. This means that they cannot form new tumours, which in turn prevents the spread of cancer," explains CEO Kristensen.
Delivering to the correct address
The medicine being developed at siRNAsense can be classified as a gene therapeutic medicine, since it regulates the expression of a gene that codes for a protein. One of the challenges with medicines such as these is getting them to regulate exactly the gene intended - and only in the cells that need to be affected. The goal is to deliver the medicine to precisely the right address, cancer cells circulating in the body, but to no other locations.
This is what siRNAsense is now researching. The company has chosen to purchase "delivery technology" from the French firm Polyplus, which specialises in encasing and delivering medicines to the intended body cells. siRNAsense will soon be conducting animal trials to see whether its medicine is indeed properly reaching the cancer cells and whether this prevents their spread.
The plan is to bring development of a medicine to combat malignant melanoma as far as the start of clinical trials, i.e. testing on humans. At that point the medicine is to be licensed to another company for further development, hopefully to be widely implemented one day as a common treatment for stopping the spread of melanoma.
What is RNA?RNA, the abbreviation for ribonucleic acid, performs vital functions in the cell, transmitting the information contained in genetic material (DNA) and applying it to the synthesis of proteins. Different types of RNA are involved in various stages of this process. siRNA (short interfering RNA) is considered a new class of molecules which affect the expression of genes in the cell. siRNA is considered one of the most promising tools in the advancement of modern medicine. siRNAsense |
- Published:
- 23.09.2008
- Last updated:
- 24.09.2008
