PRECLINIC EVALUATION OF SIRNAS AGAINST VEGFR‐2 FOR THE TREATMENT OF DIABETIC RETINOPATHY

Abstract

The vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) is a group of important proteins in the signaling for vasculogenesis and angiogenesis, it has been reported to participate in the development of diabetic retinopathy (RD), which is the second cause of blindness worldwide, within the VEFG pathway, it has been reported that VEGFR‐2 is the principal involved in RD, for this reason, the aim of this work is to evaluate the expression of VEFGR‐2 in the retina of diabetic rats and also design and synthesize a siRNA to the VEFGR‐2. Wistar rats were inyected with streptozotocin (60mg/kg/i.p), after 4, 8 and 12 weeks the neovascularization was evaluated by junctions and lacunarity, the retina was extracted and the expression of VEFGR‐2 was determined by RT‐PCR. For the siRNA's design, we used Wizard v3.1, RNAfold and EMBOSS software programs, the selected sequences were synthesized with a MERMADE 8 and evaluated. The results obtained showed that there is an increase of junctions and in the levels of VEGFR‐2 and a decrease of lacunarity in the retina with 8 and 12 weeks of diabetes evolution.The evaluation of siRNA suggests that 343–364 and 2621–2641 regions are susceptible to degrade. Preliminary results showed a decrease in the neovascularization when we administrated the siRNAs. Thus, our conclusions are that early diabetes can produce DR and our siRNA maybe could decrease the DR evolution.Support or Funding InformationGrants: Instituto Politécnico Nacional (SIP‐20194983), Programa Institucional de Formación de Investigadores del IPN (BEIFI No. 2062), Scholarship by Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACYT No.630882) and Comisión de Operación y Fomento de Actividades del IPN (COFAA).This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2019 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal.