Reconfigurable Nucleic Acid Materials for Cancer Therapy

According to the WHO, we can expect the rise of around 24 million new cases of cancer per year by around 2030 worldwide, which is a 70% increase from 2012. The molecular key players leading to cancer are heterogeneous in respect to tissue origin and may vary from patient to patient, calling for an individualized approach. Nucleic acid biopolymers (DNA and RNA) lend themselves toward applications in personalized therapeutics with high programmability based on their primary structure of five building blocks as well as biocompatibility based on established roles and functional abilities in vivo. Based on the last decades of advances in synthetic methods and natural functions of RNA, various pathways for the regulation of gene expression and DNA/RNA protein binding pathways have been uncovered, leading to the development of novel nanoparticle formulations with governing design principles. For the translation of such approaches into the clinic, the immunogenicity, strategies for delivery, and integration of mechanisms for conditional activation of therapeutic nucleic acids are explored.