RE:RE:RE:RE:siRNA powerful tool Here's a paper from Nature in 2006 describing siRNA as a cancer therapy as the "fastest growing sector". So it dates back to at least then.
https://www.nature.com/articles/7700931
My take would be that there is sufficient research in the literature that maybe you could pigback on all that previous work to come up with a rationally designed siRNA PDC relatively quickly without having to prove very much beforehand. There seem to be a number of already described siRNA for knocking out key cancer genes. My approach would be to pick one well studied siRNA to use as a test study. Many of the big problems seem to occur when you test these molecules in animals/humans and they get recognized as RNA by enzymes and the immune system and get destroyed. In cells in plastic dishes you don't have these problems you just (I say just) need to get it in the cell (SORT1 peptide) and then release it as an active molecule in the cell. It might be that this in vitro work is doable in a relatively short period of time. To get those studies done you don't really want to be inventing anything much that is new, you just take what is known and apply it to your situation.
Having said that I'd consider this R&D, not preclinical yet. The first question might be "Can you deliver any siRNA to a cancer cell?". Answering that might generate a poster at a conference relatively quickly. Doing the work to land on a specific molecule that you want to take to an IND would involve a lot more work.
Wino115 wrote: I wonder how long perfecting the use of siRNA for tumor cell destruction will be? Is it something fairly well understood or literally brand new. From the dates of these, it seems like it's the new-new.
I think the Sortina guys approach is using sortilin to attract their drug in order to change the T-Cells from replicating. Not sure it's actually siRNA, but something just going for the T-Cell's within the breast cancer tumor.