Biocatalytic process shows promise for large-scale medicinal oligonucleotide production
Promising nucleic acid therapies could be made more cheaply, greenly and simply
A ‘one pot’ process for manufacturing oligonucleotides – short 20–30 base pair DNA or RNA molecules – has been developed. Oligonucleotides are of interest as they can be used to treat a range of medical conditions, but mass producing them is still difficult.
The biocatalytic process to produce oligonucleotides was developed by Sarah Lovelock at the University of Manchester, and colleagues. It can be carried out in an aqueous solution and uses a polymerase enzyme to extend a template strand with unprotected nucleoside triphosphate building blocks and an endonuclease enzyme to release it and regenerate a new template.
The new method is significant, because it could make the manufacture of oligonucleotides cheaper and more scalable than using solid-phase synthesis methods, which have been widely used in industry for more than 30 years.