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Thursday, July 9, 2009

The RNAi Therapeutics Blog is Back

After taking a break for almost a year to finish up my post-doctoral studies and to figure out what to do with my future, I have decided to pick up writing this blog again. In addition to what I hope will be a small contribution to explaining RNAi Therapeutics to the scientifically and financially interested public, it will also help me to better feel the pulse of RNAi Therapeutics through my interactions with you. So please feel free to comment. Initially, I will only comment when there is highly significant breaking news and will become more active again starting mid-September. There should be much to write about with first clinical data from the Alnylam and Tekmira SNALP-siRNA trials coming up which in my opinion could be a real game changer. Fingers crossed!

11 comments:

Katie said...

Glad you are back!

Anonymous said...

Hi! Back at last!!!

Allison said...

Dirk, you are the #1 guy in RNAi. Please don't leave the blog again, we all value you here too much. You can find a keyboard anywhere you decide to settle down. Welcome back.
Fritz

Enumerate said...

Welcome back!

I am not sure if the life of a postdoc differs all that much from indentured servitude ...

What do you think of the Genesis siRNA delivery technology - the Watson patent?

http://www.genesis.co.nz/Research++Development/RNAi+Programme.html

Guy. said...

New review paper on bioanalysis of siRNA. May be of interest...

http://www.scribd.com/full/17277047?access_key=key-286zaixvuhrzavyz7msg

Dirk Haussecker said...

Enumerate- Do you refer to Genesis' single-stranded RNAi approach? If yes, I agree that this is a very interesting platform for RNAi delivery. There are some hurdles for this approach, but once overcome could be complementary to double-strand siRNA delivery and I support research in this direction.

Dirk Haussecker said...

Guy- Thanks for the informative article. I will look into it. It would be nice though to be able to download it as a pdf.

Guy. said...

Dirk-you can download the pdf by clicking on 'more' and Save document.

Anonymous said...

If Gensis is using single strand siRNA they are going to run into serious IP problems with the ISIS/ALNY collaboration.

Anonymous said...

Ooops, forg ot to say welcome back Dirk!

Dirk Haussecker said...

Anonymous-
I agree that with the ISIS IP, Alnylam has a quite strong position in ssRNAi. However, as Alnylam would be the first to admit, there is still some work to be done to make ssRNAi a reality, and this implies that there is room for technologies worthy of patent protection. In the end, this may only benefit Alnylam. Generally, I believe that a little bit of competition can only be a good thing for the entire field of RNAi Therapeutics, not least in terms of spurring technology development.

By Dirk Haussecker. All rights reserved.

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