A new way of fighting cancer
![](https://assets.weforum.org/article/image/large_on4U6nhaml9AHr7jVpi6koVP-RaTiMKN6LSRlExZtHA.jpg)
![A hand holding a looking glass by a lake](/uplink.jpg)
Get involved with our crowdsourced digital platform to deliver impact at scale
Stay up to date:
Future of Global Health and Healthcare
MicroRNAs may be tiny — as few as 20 genetic letters, compared to 3 billion in the DNA of a human — but they play a major role in biology, helping to determine which genes are expressed or silenced. In the last 10 years, researchers at Yale and elsewhere have shown they play a major role in formation and spread of tumors.
However, their potential as a target for cancer therapy has not been realized because of a daunting problem that has held back clinical applications of gene therapy: How can you target minute pieces of genetic material locked safely inside the membranes of billions of cells?
Now a multi-disciplinary team of Yale researchers has solved the problem by designing a therapeutic molecule that both targets the acidic microenvironments of tumors and penetrates cells to deliver a therapeutic cargo. The new delivery system effectively killed advanced tumors in mice, the team reports in the Nov. 17 issue of the journal Nature.
“This strategy opens up a new pathway to therapy, not just for the treatment of cancer but for a host of other diseases as well,” said Donald Engelman, a co-author of the paper and the Eugene Higgins Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale.
The findings were result of an extensive collaboration between labs of Engelman, Peter Glazer, Mark Saltzman and Frank Slack.
Published in collaboration with Yale News
Author: Bill Hathaway is an Associate Director of Science and Medicine at Yale.
Image: A radiologist examines the brain X-rays of a patient who underwent a cancer prevention medical check-up at the North Bengal Oncology Center, a cancer hospital, on the outskirts of the eastern Indian city of Siliguri February 25, 2009. REUTERS/Rupak De Chowdhuri.
Don't miss any update on this topic
Create a free account and access your personalized content collection with our latest publications and analyses.
License and Republishing
World Economic Forum articles may be republished in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License, and in accordance with our Terms of Use.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.
The Agenda Weekly
A weekly update of the most important issues driving the global agenda
You can unsubscribe at any time using the link in our emails. For more details, review our privacy policy.