Ambion licences City of Hope National Medical Center and Beckman Research Institute technology for expressing siRNA from PCR products
Ambion announces it has been granted an exclusive worldwide research market licence from City of Hope National Medical Center and Beckman Research Institute for technology detailed in a patent application covering technologies for expressing small interfering RNA (siRNA) from PCR products.
RNA interference is a major advance in genomic research that allows researchers to quickly and reliably down-regulate the expression of specific genes in living cells.
Voted the top scientific breakthrough of 2002 by the journal Science, RNA interference technology is greatly accelerating the functional characterisation of genes for drug discovery and basic research efforts.
In human and other mammalian cell systems, RNA interference is induced by siRNA. siRNA can be introduced into cells directly, or it can be expressed from DNA constructs introduced into cells.
The latter method has an advantage in that it can be used for long-term studies.
The technology for expressing siRNA from linear PCR products greatly accelerates the process for preparing these DNA constructs.
The technology permits researchers to quickly prepare siRNA expression cassettes without cloning or sequencing, which means that they can rapidly test different cassettes for optimal activity in their experimental system.
Those PCR products that effectively induce gene silencing can then be cloned into vectors for long-term studies of gene function.
Ambion offers a range of siRNA-related products and services, including a custom siRNA synthesis service, validated pre-synthesised siRNAs, kits to enzymatically synthesise siRNA, siRNA expression vectors, and transfection reagents.
The PCR based siRNA expression cassette technology is an important addition to this product line.
Matt Winkler, CEO of Ambion said, "Allowing researchers to create siRNA expression cassettes by PCR will greatly advance the rate of siRNA research."
