Cancer Research UK Adopts Dharmacon Gene-Silencing Technology

21-Apr-2005

Dharmacon, Inc. announced an agreement to provide siRNA libraries to Cancer Research UK. The siRNA libraries, which were developed using Dharmacon's proprietary SMARTselection(TM) and SMARTpool® technology platforms, initially include protein kinase genes and associated pathways. Cancer Research UK is one of the few independent organizations with the ability to take pioneering cancer research from the laboratory bench to the patient's bedside, supporting both basic research and clinical trials.

"We believe that RNAi functional genomic studies have great potential in helping us achieve our vision of using world-class research to conquer cancer in two generations," said Dr. Julian Downward, principal scientist, Signal Transduction Laboratory at Cancer Research UK. "Our initial efforts over the past 18 months using retroviral vector RNAi showed us that we need more efficient and reliable gene silencing to achieve higher penetrance in our screens. We now have had success in pilot studies using high-throughput siRNA oligonucleotide assays, and we look forward to working with this collection from Dharmacon targeting nearly a thousand human genes known to be important in cell signaling."

Dharmacon's siARRAY® siRNA libraries are powerful tools for rapidly analyzing large sets of related genes. By combining the SMARTselection siRNA design algorithm with its innovative SMARTpool method of pooling four highly functional siRNAs, the siRNA reagents offer increased silencing specificity and reduced likelihood of false positive and false negative assay results - important considerations in high-throughput screens. This consistent high level of performance is enabling a wide variety of novel biological studies, including high-throughput applications in drug discovery and development.

https://www.bionity.com/en/news/45328/cancer-research-uk-adopts-dharmacon-gene-silencing-technology.html