Nucleic Acid-Based Drugs as Antiviral Agents
- Authors
- Corporate Authors
- Defence R&D Canada - Toronto, Toronto ONT (CAN)
- Abstract
- Nucleic acid-based drugs are promising classes of therapeutic agents that have important clinical applications for the prevention and treatment of viral diseases. This review highlights the applications of three main classes of oligonucleotides that are designed to suppress, inhibit and /or knock out virus gene expression. Antisense oligonucleotides have a high level of specificity and affinity for target genes and have been shown to be efficacious in the treatment of various virus infections, including HIV, hepatitis, and human papilloma viruses. Catalytic DNAzymes are DNA-based enzymes with considerable potential as they have the ability to cleave RNA transcripts at purine-pyrimidine junctions, and they do so with high level of target site flexibility. Similarly, ribozymes are catalytic RNA enzymes engineered to cleave target RNA in a sequence-specific manner. Among these are the hammerhead and hairpin ribozymes that are particularly useful for gene therapy of clinically relevant virus diseases. This review will focus on the design, mode of action, efficacy of these groups of oligonucleotides, and the evaluation of these agents from in vitro activity to efficacy in animal protection studies, through to safety in clinical trials.
- Keywords
- Oligonucleotide analysis;Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)
- Report Number
- DRDC-TORONTO-SL-2002-122 — Reprint
- Date of publication
- 22 Apr 2003
- Number of Pages
- 26
- Reprinted from
- Recent, Devel, Antiviral Res., Vol 1,2001, p 117-141
- DSTKIM No
- CA022242
- CANDIS No
- 519115
- Format(s):
- Hardcopy
Document 1 of 1
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