Oncologists have been searching for a breakthrough in cancer research and medicine for a longtime now. Although a “cure” to cancer is still leaps and bounds out of reach, oncologists found the KRAS gene to which to turn their attention and target. It was found that a cancer with the wild type form of the KRAS gene responds better to EGFR inhibiting cancer drugs than cancers with a mutation in this gene. It is not a huge step towards ultimately preventing or reversing cancer, but it is important towards the practical treatment of cancer.
Oncologists had thus started using a technique involving LNA-DNA chimeras in order to detect and determine whether or not a particular person’s cancer cells contain any mutated form of the KRAS gene. Using LNA-DNA chimeras in order to block the amplification of wild type KRAS alleles, PCR is performed to amplify any possible trace amounts of existing mutated KRAS alleles. It was found that this simple and low-cost technique, called wild-type blocking PCR (WTB-PCR), lead to a higher success rate of detecting mutated alleles, which lead to more increased efficiency in cancer treatment.
LNA chimeras are becoming used much more widely and as possible uses are discovered for these nucleotides with high stability, research based around LNA will increase greatly.
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