RNAi Screening

Earlier this year, 3 separate studies (Adamson, et al., Datlinger, et al., and Dixit, et al.) demonstrated an approach to combine pooled CRISPR genetic screening with RNA expression profiling at the single-cell level. Integrating these two approaches enables knockout-specific expression data to be generated for...

Dr. Gregory Hoffman's group from Novartis recently used a custom library from Cellecta that identified BRM/SMARCA2 as a critical target in BRG1-deficient cancers (PMID: 24520176). The shRNA library consisted of 6500 shRNAs (380 genes with 17 shRNAs per gene) involved in epigenetic regulation. These genes represented...

Researchers at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) used Cellecta's shRNA DECIPHER libraries to identify genes that sensitize pancreatic cells to gemcitabine.Pancreatic cancer has only a 6% 5-year survival rate. Gemcitabine is the standard treatment in conjunction with surgery to remove cancerous...

It's been a while since the last post to this blog. It is not that nothing has been going on, in fact, quite the opposite. It has been quite busy the past several months and, unfortunately, blog postings have suffered. However, I thought I would get things started again with short post about our recent SBIR...

Our group recently ran across an article describing an independent RNAi screen with a non-Cellecta pooled shRNA expression library that piqued our interest. In the October 2011 online Genome Biology Journal, Sims, et al. comprehensively described how to run a rigorous genome-wide pooled RNA interference screen...

A couple of months ago at the CHI Discovery on Target Conference, Hakim Djaballah, Director of the HTS Core Facility at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, gave a unique and insightful presentation highlighting the challenges RNAi screening to identify lethal loss of function interaction in oncogenic...

We recently received a phase II of our SBIR grant Exploiting Synthetic Lethality of Hematopoietic Lineage Cells to Develop Novel Targets from the NIH. Rather than trying to identify potential drug targets in oncogenic hematopoietic cells, much of the effort for this project focuses on trying to develop a...

Therapeutic approaches using multiple drug combinations have become a standard treatment model for many types of cancer. Due to the tremendous genetic complexity and adaptive nature of most human malignancies, the use of multiple drugs acting on different targets increases the efficacy and helps thwart the...

Inducible expression is often desirable for functional genetic testing to establish clear cause and effect for a specific phenotype. A particular phenotype can be demonstrably linked to expression of a specific cDNA by showing it disappears when transcription is suppressed. Although less direct, similar logic...

Researchers are often interested in using a pooled shRNA library for genome-wide RNAi screening to cast a very “wide and unbiased net to identify any and all genes functionally involved in some pathway”. Although it is not difficult to make an shRNA library targeting all human or mouse genes, it is practically very...

Cellecta's recent agreement with the Roswell Park Cancer Institute (RPCI) provides support to laboratories in their institution doing genome-wide RNAi...