Silencing of CD47 and SIRPα by Polypurine reverse Hoogsteen hairpins to promote MCF-7 breast cancer cells death by PMA-differentiated THP-1 cells.

Background In the context of tumor immunology, tumor cells have been shown to overexpress CD47, an anti-phagocytic signal directed to macrophages to escape from phagocytosis by interacting with Signal Regulatory Protein α SIRPα. In the present work, we designed Polypurine reverse Hoogsteen hairpins, PPRHs, to silence the expression of CD47 in tumor cells and SIRPα in macrophages with the aim to eliminate tumor cells by macrophages in co-culture experiments.