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The use of oligonucleotides (or small nucleic acids) as therapeutic drugs was first proposed in the late 1970s, but the issues of delivery, stability, and specificity must be addressed before they can be medically applied^[1]. After going through ups and downs, the field of oligonucleotide therapeutics is now rapidly growing. Alfa Chemistry is a global trailblazer, committed to pushing the development of biomedical technologies to improve human health. We specialize in the research and development of oligonucleotide therapeutics for various diseases.

Types of Oligonucleotide Therapeutics

Currently, oligonucleotide therapeutics investigated in clinical trials mainly include antisense oligonucleotides (ASOs), small interfering RNA (siRNAs), microRNAs (miRNA), aptamers, and others (such as CpG oligonucleotides and DNAzymes).

ASOs are small single-stranded deoxyribonucleotides (12-30 nt) that specifically bind target RNAs through Watson-Crick base pairing.
siRNAs are 20-25 bp long double stranded RNAs, which are produced by Dicer from long dsRNAs and small hairpin RNAs.
miRNAs are short (18-25 nt) single stranded non-coding RNAs that contain complementary sequences to one or more mRNAs.
Aptamers are single-stranded DNA or RNA oligonucleotides that bind to targets with high affinity based on their 3D structures.

Benefits of Oligonucleotide Therapeutics

Compared with other biological drugs, oligonucleotide therapeutics show outstanding benefits, creating possibilities for the treatment of many diseases, especially rare diseases. The benefits of oligonucleotide therapeutics include, but are not limited to, the following^[2].

Compared to other targeted therapeutics, the design of therapeutic oligonucleotides is straight-forward.
Therapeutic oligonucleotides can be synthesized in a shorter time cycle and at a lower cost.
Oligonucleotide therapeutics are able to target previously ‘undruggable’ targets, providing new approaches to complex diseases.
Oligonucleotide therapeutics show high affinity to targets based on one dimensional sequence matches, suggesting simplicity in design compared to time consuming large scale computational searches, and do not require validation of tertiary protein domain matches like small molecule therapeutics.

Our Products

At Alfa Chemistry, we have an abundance of raw materials for the development of oligonucleotide therapeutics. Additionally, we are working on some developing products for the treatment of rare diseases, liver diseases, eye diseases, cardiovascular diseases, and cancer. If you are interested in our products or our projects, please click on the link to learn more.

Raw Materials

Developing Products

References

Moumné, L.; et al. Oligonucleotide therapeutics: from discovery and development to patentability. Pharmaceutics. 2022, 14: 260.
Xiong, H.; et al. Recent advances in oligonucleotide therapeutics in oncology. International Journal of Molecular Sciences. 2021, 22: 3295.