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However, drugs based on nucleic acids — namely DNA and RNA, the vital information-carrying molecules — can control the biological functions of cells and are expected to transform the future of medicine and provide a significant boost towards efforts to overcome cancer and other hard-to-treat illnesses, caused by viruses and genetic diseases.

However, for the first time, the team was able to develop a hairpin-shaped DNA strand that can activate a natural immune response to target and kill specific cancerous cells.

These elongated strands then trigger an immune response, the body’s built-in defense mechanism, which inhibits further tumor growth.

These oHPs were triggered to form longer DNA strands when they encountered a short (micro) RNA called miR-21, which is overexpressed in some cancers.

“The formation of long DNA strands due to the interaction between short DNA oHPs and overexpressed miR-21, found by this research group, is the first example of its use as a selective immune amplification response which can target tumor regression, providing a new class of nucleic acid drug candidates with a mechanism that is completely different from known nucleic acid drugs,” said Okamoto.

Reference: “Oncolytic Hairpin DNA Pair: Selective Cytotoxic Inducer through MicroRNA-Triggered DNA Self-Assembly” by Kunihiko Morihiro, Hiraki Osumi, Shunto Morita, Takara Hattori, Manami Baba, Naoki Harada, Riuko Ohashi and Akimitsu Okamoto, 20 December 2022, Journal of the American Chemical Society.