Noncoding RNAs: From Disease to Targeted Therapeutics

Keystone Symposia, Silverthorne CO

Investigators

Abstract

ABSTRACT Support is requested for a Keystone Symposia meeting entitled Noncoding RNAs: From Disease to Targeted Therapeutics, organized by Drs. Kevin V. Morris, Archa Fox and Paloma Hoban Giangrande. The meeting will be held in Banff, Alberta, Canada from February 5-9, 2017. It has become apparent over the last decade that small and long noncoding RNAs play a major role in the regulation of gene expression and disease. While much emphasis has been centered on the role of noncoding RNAs in human disease, a gap remains in utilizing this knowledge to develop target specific approaches to disrupting noncoding RNA pathways for therapeutic gain. This meeting will for the first time bring together an interdisciplinary group of basic and applied noncoding RNA scientists in an effort to translate our current understanding of noncoding RNA biology into meaningful therapeutics for many of those diseases afflicting society. The overall goal of this meeting is to better understand the role noncoding RNAs play in the regulation of disease-relevant genes and to utilize this knowledge to develop targeted therapeutics, an eventuality that heralds a new frontier in drug development and therapeutics. Opportunities for interdisciplinary interactions will be significantly enhanced by the concurrent meeting on Protein-RNA Interactions, which will share a keynote address and plenary session with this meeting. Relevance to NCI: The National Cancer Institute is an extremely relevant NIH institute to support this meeting as many of the lncRNAs that have been discovered and described mechanistically appear to be involved in regulating tumor suppressor genes, those genes that are epigenetically silenced in several tumor types. It appears that lncRNAs play an underappreciated role in regulating tumor suppressor genes. Examples include; P21, PTEN, as well as MYC which appears to be an active modulator of entire lncRNA papers.