Hitting the genetic off switch.

Abstract

I n 1996 Worth magazine proclaimed that Isis Pharmaceuticals could become the next Microsoft, a prediction that turned out to be a particularly egregious example of hyperbole run amok. To be sure, Isis remains a leader in the gene-blocking technology called antisense. But the road to successful treatments for cancer and other diseases has been littered with disappointments. During the past few years, a new genesilencing technology has emerged that may be poised to fulfill the promise that was once trumpeted for antisense. “I’ve been writing in grants for 25 years that during the next five years I’m going to test this process or that process to see if I can do gene inactivation studies in mammalian cells in culture. And I did them, and they were so awkward and so complicated that you just couldn’t apply them generally,” says Phillip A. Sharp, director of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Lo and behold, all of the time right there in front of me was a process that I could have used.” Sharp, a co-winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, was referring to a series of relatively recent discoveries that cells have a mechanism, dubbed RNA interference (RNAi), which blocks gene expression. It prevents RNA transcripts of genes from giving rise to the proteins those genes encode. This natural method of gene silencing comes into play, for example, when viruses try to commandeer a cell’s protein-making machinery to produce viral proteins. A milestone arrived in 1998, when Andrew Z. Fire, now at the Stanford University School of Medicine, and Craig C. Mello of the University of Massachusetts Medical School identified in worms double-stranded RNAs that acted as the switch to turn off genes in RNAi. And in 2001 Thomas Tuschl, now at the Rockefeller University, found that an abbreviated version of double-stranded RNAs— short interfering RNAs (siRNAs)—could shut off genes in mammalian cells. The number of research papers on RNAi has mushroomed from a dozen-plus in 1998 to multiple hundreds last year. Even if the promise for therapeutics never materializes, it is quite likely that some of the seminal discoveries will garner Nobel Prizes. “This has touched everything we do in biological science, from plants to man,” Sharp notes. [See “Censors of the Genome,” by Nelson C. Lau and David P. Bartel; Scientific American, August 2003.] The excitement about siRNAs as drugs relates to how they differ in critical ways from antisense therapeutics. At first glance, siRNAs seem very similar to antisense. An antisense drug consists of an artificially synthesized chain of nucleotides, or genetic building blocks, that binds to a messenger RNA containing a complementary sequence. This binding blocks gene expression. An siRNA also silences genes— and it even uses a complementary RNA, or antisense, strand to do so. Once inside a cell, an siRNA attaches to an aggregate of proteins called an RNA-induced silencing complex (RISC), which retains only the antisense strand. The siRNA-bearing RISC then binds to the targeted messenger RNA and degrades it or prevents it from functioning [see box on page 100]. Unlike the antisense drugs that have been under development for the past 15 years, siRNAs do not disrupt only a single messenger RNA. They act as catalysts, doing the same job over and over, one explanation for their apparent potency. “They are 100to 1,000-fold more effective than antisense,” says Judy Lieberman, a senior investigator at the CBR Institute for Biomedical Research in Boston and one of the first researchers to show the therapeutic potential of the technique in animals. Already almost 100 companies are