Study Details Methods for Improving Antisense Drugs

A newly published article describes two new methods that could accelerate the development of improved antisense drugs by detecting and measuring their levels in cells.

Frederick Schnell, Stacy Crumley, Dan Mourich, and P.L. Iversen of Sarepta Therapeutics and Oregon State University explained how their methods aided in detecting one type of antisense therapeutics, phosphorodiamidate morpholine oligomers (PMO). The authors discuss the measurement of intranasally-delivered PMO in lung tissue and, more specifically, in different cell types in the lung. They were able to measure the clearance kinetics of the PMO and determine whether it stayed in the lung tissue.

The co-authors detailed the two methods in “Development of Novel Bioanalytical Methods to Determine the Effective Concentrations of Phosphorodiamidate Morpholino Oligomers in Tissues and Cells.” The article appeared in BioResearch Open Access, a bimonthly peer-reviewed open access journal from GEN publisher Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers, and is available on the journal’s website.

“The development of novel, rapid PMO detection techniques such as these will advance the field of PMO research in a significant way, providing valid alternatives to the current time-consuming and labor-intensive methods," says editor-in-chief Jane Taylor, Ph.D., senior research fellow at the U.K. Medical Research Council’s MRC Center for Regenerative Medicine, based at the University of Edinburgh.