Research Activities
These are exciting times in the scientific world. The public all over the world is fascinated by the spectacular advances in gene therapy, sequencing of the human genome, and stem cell research. These advances promise to prevent, correct or modulate genetic and acquired diseases, which use genes to produce therapeutic proteins or inhibit aberrant protein production.
The launching of the human proteome project has turned functional genomics and proteomics into powerful bullworks, which will give us an integrated scenario of turning nucleic acids into therapeutics. The development of effective nucleic acid therapeutics demands teamwork among scientists with expertise in molecular and cell biology, biochemistry, biophysics, polymer chemistry, colloid science, pharmaceutics, and medicine.
In the last decade, significant progress has been made in the use of nucleic acids, such as plasmid DNA, antisense oligonucleotides, siRNA, ribozymes, peptide nucleic acids (PNA) and aptamer nucleic acids for nucleic acid therapy.
