Santaris presents on new LNA candidates

Danish biopharmaceutical company Santaris presented promising new findings on the activity of a new class of microRNA-targeted therapeutic candidates developed with its Locked Nucleic Acid technology platform at the Oligonucleotide Therapeutics Society meeting in Boston, Massachusetts, USA.

In both in vitro and in vivo models, including rodents and non-human human primates, Santaris Pharma's LNA-antimiRs demonstrated outstanding recognition and detection of disease-associated microRNAs due to their high specificity and affinity, bolstering the company's efforts to develop new LNA-based, microRNA-targeted therapeutics for human disease.

"The breadth of the presentations being made this week underscore the value that our proprietary Locked Nucleic Acid technology holds for bringing antisense back to the forefront, and the potential that this holds for producing new drugs that are highly potent, precise and capable of being delivered systemically," said Henrik Orum, chief scientific officer. "Furthermore our results demonstrate that the LNA technology is optimal for the development of microRNA antagonists. Our small single-stranded oligonuclotide sequences are easily delivered to the cell and bind to microRNAs with even higher affinity than competing natural messenger RNAs," he added.