Research Keywords:
- PNA
- FIT-PNA
- RNA sensors
- ASO
- SNP
Research Highlights:
The Yavin lab at the School of Pharmacy focuses on the development of DNA mimics termed Peptide Nucleic Acids (PNAs) as antisense oligonucleotides (ASOs) and as RNA sensors. The lab has developed in the past decade PNAs targeted for cancer therapy (antimiRs and splice switching oligonucleotides) and has put much effort in recent years in developing highly sensitive and selective RNA sensors (termed FIT-PNAs) for the diagnosis of cancer and of the human pathogen (P. falciparum). Some of our recent work has shown that these FIT-PNAs are selective to single point mutations (SNPs). SNPs include those that are associated with drug resistance in malaria and those that are hallmark biomarkers in cancer.