Specific silencing of leukemic oncogenes using RNA-interference approach

Abstract

RNA-interference is an effective natural mechanism of post-transcriptional modulation of gene expression. RNA-interference mechanism exists as in high eukaryotes both animals and plants as well in lower eukaryotes and viruses. RNA-interference is now used as a powerful tool in the study of functional gene activity, and many essential for fundamental biology results were obtained with this approach. Also it is widely believed that RNA-interference could be used in working out of new therapeutic medicine against malignant, infectious and hereditary diseases. One of the main problems of these developments is search of effective methods of siRNA transfer into the target cells. At the present time different sorts of transfections or viral transduction are used for these purposes. The results of comparison of inhibition of expression of oncogene AM L-ETO by synthetic siRNA and by recombinant lentiviruses coding for corresponding shRNA are presented in the article.