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Date: April 10, 2025
Time: 11am EDT / 5pm CEST
Join us for the fourth Trainee Spotlight webinar of the year featuring trainees Faith Kivunga, Atish Wagh Ph.D, and Svenja Dudek, poster awards winners from the 2024 OTS Annual Meeting held last fall.
Title: Lipid-stapled Oligonucleotide Supramolecular St
Presentation Description:
G-quadruplexes, located within the promoter regions of oncogenes, contribute to the regulation of transcription by facilitating the binding of transcription factors. Oligonucleotide mimics of these G-quadruplex structures function as decoys, competing with the natural DNA for transcription factor binding, thereby leading to the downregulation of oncogene expression. A significant challenge in utilizing these decoys is ensuring their stability, controlling their 3-D conformation, and facilitating their efficient delivery into cells. The conjugation of these oligonucleotides to lipid moieties has successfully addressed these challenges, resulting in enhanced stability and improved anticancer efficacy in pancreatic cancer cell lines.
Speaker:
Title: Enhanced Purity of sgRNA and pegRNA by use of 5’-Terminal Dioctyloxytrityl (DOT) Protecting Group
Presentation Description:
Ensuring the purity of oligonucleotide therapeutics is critical for both safety and efficacy. CRISPR guides such as sgRNAs and pegRNAs promise ground breaking advances, but purifying these oligonucleotides exceeding 100 nucleotides in length presents unique challenges. Conventional methods often struggle to achieve the requisite purity. Addressing this, we introduce a novel purification approach using dioctyloxy trityl chloride (DOT-Cl), marking a significant advancement in long oligonucleotide purification.
Speaker:
Title: Design considerations towards a RIG-I adjuvanted CMV mRNA vaccine
Presentation Description:
We are working on controlable innate immune stimulation of mRNA vaccines to provide adjuvant activity. Too much interferon might shut down translation of the delivered antigen. Just enough interferon however can provide costimulatory signalling and upregulation of MHC proteins to enhance the presentation of the antigen and promote activation of B and T cells. Therefore, we developed a modular RIG-I ligand construct hybridized to the mRNA.
