As gene therapy technologies blossom, ddRNAi tries to take root

Nicholette Zeliadt
Before there was Twitter, there was Facebook, and before that, Friendster. And who can forget MySpace? There’s a similar trend of successive usurping technologies in the fast-moving quest to develop therapeutics capable of modifying the genome. Since the late nineties, we’ve witnessed the rise of several gene-silencing approaches, from “antisense” oligonucleotides and RNA interference (RNAi) to the latest targeted genome-editing techniques, such as those based on zinc finger nucleases or CRISPR.