- Cellular Delivery
- Chemical Syntheses
- DNA Recognition
- Gene Correction
- Gene Regulation
- Infectious Diseases
- Molecular Engineering
- Peptide Therapeutics
- Unstable Repeat Disorders
Gene Regulation
Antisense and antigene are promising technologies for regulating gene expression because of the simplicity and specificity of recognition and the generality in sequence design; however, the major obstacles are cellular delivery, nonspecific binding and cytotoxicity. While some progress has been made on the cellular delivery front, the other two issues remain a bottle-neck for molecular therapies. Work in our group is focused on the design of nucleic acid platforms with specific chemical modifications and secondary structures, in attempts to modify the hybridization kinetics and thermodynamics in such a way that they are more favorable toward the perfectly-matched than the mismatched targets, as compared to the standard, linear motif.
