Merck alliance with Alnylam

Merck and Alnylam (a biotech startup funded by Polaris, Atlas Ventures and others) recently announced an alliance aimed at developing and bringing to market drugs using RNAi technology.

RNAi (or RNA interference) is a powerful new technique that can be used to "silence" or block the expression of specific genes in a very targeted way by introducing a species of RNA into the cell. The technique can therefore be used either as a way of discovering the function of specific genes or as a means of disabling the production of a disease-causing protein. The latter enables the creation of RNA-based drugs that can target gene-based diseases including viral diseases (related to entry of foriegn genetic material into the cell), cancers (related to gene mutations) and inflammations (related to overexpression of specific genes).

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RNAi is a form of post-transcriptional regulation - acting after a gene has been transcribed from DNA into RNA but before the RNA has been translated into protein. During transcription, the genetic code is transferred from DNA into mRNA (messenger RNA) segments that travel out of the nucleus. The RNAi technique involves the introduction of siRNA (small interfering RNA - short pieces of double-stranded RNA whose code matches that of the corresponding mRNA) segments that can be targeted to destroy a specific mRNA corresponding to a particular gene, thereby controlling the expression of that gene.