John Burnett Speaks at Bioinformatics & Pharmacogenomics Conference June 19-20, 2014 in San Diego
John Burnett, Assistant Research Professor in Molecular Cellular Biology at City of Hope, to Give a Presentation at the Bioinformatics & Pharmacogenomics: Managing and Analyzing Big Data Conference on Jun 19-20, 2014 in San Diego, CA.
- San Diego, CA (1888PressRelease) March 29, 2014 - John Burnett, Assistant Research Professor in Molecular and Cellular Biology at City of Hope, will give a presentation on "Small RNA-Based Therapeutics for HIV/AIDS" at the Bioinformatics & Pharmacogenomics: Managing and Analyzing Big Data Conference, to be held in San Diego, CA on June 19-20, 2014 by GTC.
Dr. Burnett will share about how RNA-based therapeutics offer versatility and unique properties that make them attractive drug candidates. Dr. Burnett's lab focuses on developing RNA aptamer and small interfering RNA (siRNA) chimeric molecules as novel biological therapeutics. In addition to these systemically delivered aptamer-siRNA drugs, he and his team are using lentiviral vector based approaches as a platform to deliver anti-HIV siRNAs and RNA decoys. Such vectors can be transduced in hematopoietic stem cells (HSC) to generate an HIV-resistant immune system in the HSC recipient. Their recent work has focused on creating potent yet safe methods of expressing multiple small RNAs, including the modification of the natural MCM7 microRNA expression cassette to express three anti-HIV siRNAs.
For their siRNA therapeutics, the lab uses Solexa deep sequencing to understand how the 21-mer siRNAs and Dicer substrate siRNAs are processed and retained by the RNA interference machinery. From these studies, they have identified patterns of nucleotide removal and non-template addition to the 3'-ends of the siRNA guide strand. They are now exploring the effects of these modifications to the stability and potency of the siRNA guide strands. They are also developing RNA aptamers through a selection process known as cell-based SELEX. However, the lab have incorporated Solexa deep sequencing into this protocol to characterize their RNA aptamer library after each selection to identify particular RNA sequence motifs that impart the desired aptamer binding properties. These improvements have led to enhanced enrichment for aptamers with high affinity and specificity.
The Bioinformatics & Pharmacogenomics: Managing and Analyzing Big Data Conference brings together a mix of academic and industry experts from leading affiliations (such as GSK, Takeda, Johns Hopkins, UCSD, Stanford, UCLA) to cover current and relevant aspects of sequencing platforms, data integration, personal genomics and pharmacogenomics.
This conference is also part of the Nucleic Acid Summit, which consists of this conference and three other conferences:
4th Next-Generation Sequencing
Non-Coding RNAs and RNAi Research & Therapeutics
Nucleic Acid Research & Discovery
For more information, please visit www.gtcbio.com/bioinformatics
###
space
space
Satisfied Users & 
Approved Press Releases
Print
Email
Report Spam