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news.Lentigen Corporation and Dharmacon have entered into a multi-year collaboration to develop and manufacture lentiviral expression reagents to deliver short hairpin RNA expression vectors into cells, using RNA interference mediated gene silencing.
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Short hairpin RNA (shRNA) is useful where long-term gene suppression is required, or where the cells are resistant to other delivery methods. Its use, however, has been limited by lack of design and processing methods that provide reliable and reproducible gene silencing. The goal of the collaboration is to overcome those obstacles and create commercially available, reliable, efficient lentiviral reagents for RNA interference research.
Under the terms of the agreement, resulting products will be commercialized by Dharmacon and manufactured by Lentigen.
“Lentiviral shRNA expression technology is highly complementary to siRNA (short interfering RNA) based silencing and we believe our collaboration with Lentigen will result in efficient and reproducible gene silencing using shRNA,” said William Marshall, vice president of technology and business development, Fisher Biosciences.
Lentiviral vectors are vehicles that can deliver genetic material into cells with up to 100% stable gene transfer efficiency. By comparison, other expression systems such as non-viral, retroviral, adenoviral and adeno-associated viral vectors lack these desirable properties. In the field of RNAi, lentiviral delivery will supplement the chemical and mechanical delivery systems commonly used with siRNA by efficiently creating cell lines that stably express RNAi. Such cell lines have broad utility in research, from functional genomics to target validation and drug discovery, among other applications.
Gene silencing using lentiviral reagents is accomplished by the binding and fusing of the LV pseudotyped envelope protein to the target cell membrane. The LV RNA containing the shRNA sequence is then delivered into the cell and a DNA complex is created via reverse transcription. This complex enters the target cell nucleus incorporating into the chromosomal DNA creating a stable molecule. The shRNA sequence is integrated in the chromosome and copied along with the target cell’s DNA during ongoing cell division.