Engineering Commons^™

Renal Specific Rnai Delivery By Fibrillar Nanoparticle Excipients, Sam Wong

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

RNA interference (RNAi) is a powerful tool to manipulate the phenotype of an organism by silencing the expression of specific genes and is viewed as a highly promising platform for treating undruggable targets and disorders where small molecule drugs and antibodies would fail. However, development of RNAi based therapies has faced major barriers including cellular and tissue-specific uptake of the Small Interfering RNA (siRNA). Utilizing different nanoparticles as RNAi excipients, cellular uptake and gene silencing potency can be greatly improved. The research in Dr. McDevitt groups has fibrillar carbon nanotubes (CNT) as carriers for siRNA for gene silencing in vitro …