The Genie Is Out of the Bottle

 

You want to see how far the genie got, search on circular RNA therapies or endless RNA until you get results like:

 https://www.biopharmadive.com/news/laronde-flagship-launch-endless-rna-erna/599841/  or

https://cen.acs.org/pharmaceuticals/drug-discovery/Flagship-launches-Laronde-develop-circular/99/web/2021/05  or, for a better explanation…

https://www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/orna-therapeutics-debuts-100m-engineered-circular-rna-treatments-to-rival-cell-therapies

OK. We had our noses pressed against the glass once more as we were shown the lemons to lemonade process (which is getting pretty smooth I have to agree) of advancing our familiarity of linear RNA to the circular closed loop and more stable RNA not subject to  the enzyme take down linear RNA is subject to.

Circular RNA does have its peculiarities, if not being equipped with the usual amount of RNA proteins can be called peculiar;  having few, if any detectable proteins offers biopharmacology a brand new playing field and science has learned there is big money in brands.

To get a less excitable introduction to circularRNA  I will leave you with this three year old message from  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6189416/

At the moment, the view prevails that the vast majority of the thousands of circRNAs is not found in an active translation state (; ; ). Most circRNAs do also not stem from the very 5′ regions of genes (), and, therefore, besides the fact that they do not carry a linear 5′Cap structure, do not encode features that enable protein translation from an endogenous start codon. A tiny fraction (<1%) of circRNAs does happen to contain the start AUG codon and to be associated with active ribosomes. In these cases circularization had led to the inclusion of 5′ untranslated region (5′UTR) sequences. For a handful of tested circRNAs, like Drosophila circMbl, circPde8, circTai, circCdi and mouse circZNF609, these 5′UTRs structurally folded into internal ribosome entry sites (IRES). This allowed the circRNAs to associate with the small subunit of ribosomes and become templates for protein translation despite being circular (; Pamudurti et al., 2017)…

Keep in mind, please, this information was published October  2018 and...

The molecular analysis of circRNAs is still in its infancy, but it is becoming clear that circRNAs can be functionally relevant, and that functions can be quite diverse. In the following chapter, we will focus on those circRNAs whose therapeutic potential can be assessed from knockdown or circRNA overexpression in mouse disease models of CVD in vivo (Table Table11).

If you require any explanation of the subject matter, you can always direct your questions to your local, State and Federal  representatives.  Maybe they’ll learn something.

The important things to do is 1) not rely on press releases like those linked above and 2) make an effort to read the information from the ncbi website for balance.

When you start reflecting on your humanity and your past ability to get through a virus or flu session with chicken soup and a little more sleep than normal and you think about what is happening these days and wonder why it changed, what made it so different remember this phrase: Evil Greedy Thieving Lying Democrats and their lap dog Republicans.

Hope I helped.

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