Rational Design of a New Generation of Therapeutic Oligonucleotide Tools

This webinar will present new chemically modified oligonucleotide tools with the potential to tackle multifactorial disorders (among them, cancer and related drug resistance issues), while overcoming the limitations of oligonucleotide therapeutics.

Among the different oligonucleotide tools that will be presented, special emphasis will be placed on novel multi-target nanostructures specifically designed to administer several oligonucleotide drugs in a single dose, each of them active against a different therapeutic target. In addition, their functionalization with accessory molecules, such as fluorophores and targeting peptides for monitoring their specific delivery to tumours, will also be discussed.

Key Learning Topics

• New chemical modification approaches to increase the biostability of oligonucleotides.

• Functionalization of therapeutic oligonucleotides with accessory molecules, such as targeting peptides, for their selective delivery to the tumour.

• Multi-target approaches to deliver multiple oligonucleotide drugs in a single dose.

What to Expect

Presentation of new chemical modification approaches to: i) increase the resistance of oligonucleotide drugs to 3’-exonuclease degradation, ii) create novel robust siRNA prodrugs that can act as substrates for Dicer, and iii) combine multiple oligonucleotide drugs into one single structure that can be selectively cleaved by specific intracellular stimuli, such as endogenous enzymes.

Presenter: Dr. Montserrat Terrazas (Associate Professor - Department of Inorganic and Organic Chemistry (Organic Chemistry Section), Faculty of Chemistry, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain)

Montserrat Terrazas received her PhD degree from the University of Barcelona (UB) in 2006. She carried out postdoctoral stays at KU Leuven, Stanford University, and IQAC-CSIC. From 2014 to 2020, she stayed at IRB-Barcelona as a Miguel Servet Fellow. In 2021, she was appointed as an Associate Professor at UB.

[Montserrat Terrazas received her PhD degree from the University of Barcelona (UB) in 2006. She carried out postdoctoral stays at KU Leuven, Stanford University, and IQAC-CSIC. From 2014 to 2020, she stayed at IRB-Barcelona as a Miguel Servet Fellow. In 2021, she was appointed as an Associate Professor at UB.

https://webgrec.ub.edu/webpages/000007/cat/montserrat.terrazas.ub.edu.html#

Presenter Dr. Martial Piotto (Pharma product manager of Biologics solutions)

Martial Piotto obtained his Ph.D. in NMR spectroscopy at the University of Purdue, USA (Pr. D. Gorenstein). He then joined Bruker France as head of NMR application where he worked on various aspects of NMR spectroscopy, notably the development of new pulse sequences and HRMAS technology. Over the years, he grew an interest in applications of NMR in the pharmaceutical and medical fields. His work currently focusses on the characterization of Biologics (mAb, vaccines and therapeutic oligonucleotides) by combining NMR and multivariate statistical tools.