SomaGenics Presents RNAi Therapeutic Program
/Santa Cruz, CA, May, 2017 – SomaGenics’ President and CEO, Brian Johnston, Ph.D., recently presented an invited seminar, “Treating chronic diabetic wounds: A small RNA approach,” to the Institute for RNA Medicine of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, just renamed the Harvard Medical School Initiative on RNA Medicine (IRM). SomaGenics’ novel synthetic short hairpin RNA (sshRNA®) platform has been used to develop therapeutic candidates for chronic diabetic wounds as well as treatments for hepatitis delta virus. Dr. Johnson was invited to serve on the IRM Business Advisory Board. “I am looking forward to the opportunity to work with the IRM’s scientists and stakeholders and hope to contribute to advancing RNA-based treatments across many therapeutic areas.”
Dr. Johnston also presented a talk entitled “Local delivery of Therapeutic RNAs Accelerates Wound Healing in Diabetic Mice” at the Keystone Conference on Noncoding RNAs: From Disease to Targeted Therapeutics, held in Banff, Canada. SomaGenics’ NIH-funded project seeks to accelerate wound healing in diabetic patients by restoring the normal response to hypoxia, which is impaired in these patients. “We are encouraged by the results we have generated in collaboration with Dr. Geoffrey Gurtner’s lab at Stanford. We have been able to show a therapeutically significant increase in the rate of wound closure in diabetic mice.”
SomaGenics is a privately held biotech company with offices and laboratories located in Santa Cruz, Calif. It specializes in developing innovative technologies that focus on RNA molecules as therapeutic agents and targets as well as biomarkers. The company's therapeutic platform includes sshRNA therapeutic candidates for viral hepatitis as well as for wound healing. SomaGenics’ RNA analysis platforms include miR-ID®, a novel circularization-based RT-qPCR method, miR-Direct®for microRNA analysis directly from blood samples, and the RealSeq® family of technologies for non-biased small RNA library construction for next-generation sequencing (NGS).