What is Isis Pharmaceuticals?
Isis Pharmaceuticals is a drug discovery and development company which is the leading researcher in the field of antisense therapies. Antisense is a treatment for genetic disorders which focuses on the use of specially coded nucleic strands to bind to mRNA within a patient’s cells. For those of you who remember high school biology class, mRNA is the nucleic acid which carries coding information from the nucleus to the ribosomes for protein synthesis. A sense is a single sequence which codes for a particular protein. Antisense therapies focus on suppressing expression of a particular sense which effectively “turns off” particular genes. Antisense drugs are a new class of pharmaceuticals and have the potential to change the way diseases are treated. Since these drugs are highly specific, targeting individual proteins being coded by RNA, they represent a large step towards more personalized medicine and theoretically should reduce unwanted side-effects in comparison to traditional protein
