This new therapeutic approach brings hope to the treatment of a wide range of diseases (mostly genetic). The animation below explains clearly the mode of action of antisense therapy by comparing it to the “classical” model of pharmacologic intervention.
Antisense therapy definition, according to Wikipedia:
Antisense therapy is a form of treatment for genetic disorders or infections. When the genetic sequence of a particular gene is known to be causative of a particular disease, it is possible to synthesize a strand of nucleic acid (DNA, RNA or a chemical analogue) that will bind to the messenger RNA (mRNA) produced by that gene and inactivate it, effectively turning that gene “off”. This is because mRNA has to be single stranded for it to be translated. Alternatively, the strand might be targeted to bind a splicing site on pre-mRNA and modify the exon content of an mRNA.
This synthesized nucleic acid is termed an “anti-sense” oligonucleotide because its base sequence is complementary to the gene’s messenger RNA (mRNA), which is called the “sense” sequence (so that a sense segment of mRNA ” 5′-AAGGUC-3′ ” would be blocked by the anti-sense mRNA segment ” 3′-UUCCAG-5′ “).