The Discovery of Antisense Therapy
The concept behind antisense oligonucleotide gene silencing was introduced in 1978 by Stephenson and Zamecnik. They came up with the idea after they used an antisense oligonucleotide to stop viral replication in cell culture. An antisense oligonucleotide is a single strand of nucleic acid or nucleic acid analogs; more than often an oligodeoxyribonucleotide, usually 15–20 nucleotides in length with sequence complementary to a specific target mRNA. The target mRNA and the antisense oligonucleotide bind together via Watson and Crick's base pairing. This hybridization then leads to reduced levels of translation of the target transcript. Stephenson and Zamecnik would not have been able to discover this technology without the discovery of the double helix by Watson and Crick. Due to the discovery of the double helix, scientists were able to learn more about genes which eventually led to the discovery of antisense therapy. Watson and Crick worked in at Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, England. They came up with a method of how the double helix is formed called heteroduplex. Rosalind Franklin is also another scientist who contributed to the discovery of antisense therapy. Her work and ideas about the double helix and inward faces bases, as well as her calculations of the DNA molecule helped Watson and Crick to form a model of the DNA molecule.