We are TrigGate!
The use of RNA as a therapeutic tool is a new frontier in the broad view of disease treatment and prevention. RNA-based therapies hold the potential to revolutionize fields such as vaccines, personalized medicine and cancer therapy. Since RNA is easy to manufacture, safe, modular, cost effective and holds the ability to target previously untreatable pathologies, RNA-based treatments could serve as the future standard in medicine.
One of the big challenges such treatments face is the lack of specificity. Current delivery methods are general, where the RNA molecules are delivered with nonspecific vehicles and arrive not only to the cells we wish to target, but many more. In that case, we get expression of our protein of interest in unwanted cells, which can result in high toxicity.
One way to address this challenge is by building selective vehicles, which deliver the RNA molecule only to a specific tissue. While creative and promising, specific delivery is far from ideal and has to be further optimized.
Our intention is to address this problem from a different perspective. We plan on utilizing the secondary structure that RNA molecules fold into, using toehold switches. A toehold switch is a secondary mRNA structure in the 5' UTR of the mRNA, enabling/disabling translation based on the physical accessibility of the mRNA to approaching ribosomes, induced by the presence/lack of presence of a trigger RNA molecule that might interact with the switch and change its conformation.
We developed a computational models-based tool for designing toehold switches in a generic manner. We use several algorithms, taken from the literature and developed by us, to design the toehold sequence in a generic manner that will enable this concept for many applications. Visit our software tool website!
The ability to generate an adapted switch for any use might substantially enhance the ability of research facilities and industrial companies to induce an efficient specific translation. By that, the developing field of RNA-based therapeutics might be scaled up.