The founder of SiranBio, Dr. Zhiwei Yang was invited to University of Kentucky (UK) Medical School to give a seminar titled “siRNA – How it is changing drug discovery and chronic disease treatment”.  Dr. Yang introduced the proprietary platform technologies for siRNA drug discovery, and the recent progresses on SiranBio’s pipeline in chronic hepatitis B, fat control, and hypertension.

siRNA has huge advantages compared to small molecule drug discovery in many aspects.  It can be applied to many drug targets that previously considered to be non-druggable.  It also greatly expedites the drug development process, and increases the success rate.  siRNA drugs are usually very safe and have super long duration.  Many chronic diseases, such as hypertension, hyperlipidemia, obesity, and gout can be treated one injection in 6-12 months.  Chronic hepatitis B can potentially functional cured by a few months’ treatment.

Cancer is the research interest of many scientists in UK.  Dr. Yang discussed in details with professors and postdoc there on the possible scenarios and technical challenges in this field.  siRNA has many favorable properties which are ideal for cancer treatments.  They can be designed specifically targeting for certain mutations, and can be easily prepared as a cocktail to target several genes simultaneously.  The scientists in UK also shared their recent progresses in cancer research, and discussed the possible applications of siRNA drugs in cancer treatments.