Programming DNA to Deliver Cancer Drugs
Published:12 Apr.2018 Source:Nanowerk
DNA has an important job – it tells your cells which proteins to make. Now, scientists at the University of Delaware have developed technology to program strands of DNA into switches that turn proteins on and off. This technology could lead to the development of new cancer therapies and other drugs.
This project taps into an emerging field known as DNA computing. DNA is essentially a code with four components, the nucleotides guanine, adenine, cytosine, and thymine. In cells, the arrangement of these four nucleotides determines the output – the proteins made by the DNA.