RNA hitches a ride on ultrasound waves
MIT and Brigham and Women’s Hospital researchers have demonstrated that they can deliver strands of RNA efficiently to colon cells, using bursts of ultrasound waves that propel the RNA into the cells. Using this approach, the researchers dramatically turned down the production of a protein involved in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), in mice. “What we saw in this paper was the ultrasound can enable rapid delivery of these molecules,” says Carl Schoellhammer, a postdoc at MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and the study’s lead author. “In this case it was proinflammatory molecules that we were shutting off, and we saw tremendous knockdown of those proteins.” Delivering nucleic acids such as RNA to cells to dampen or boost a target protein is a strategy that holds potential to treat many diseases, but delivering the molecules to the right destination has proven challenging. The researchers demonstrated a simple method that does not...