SMARTvector™ shRNA technology: Enabling cell and gene therapies

Expression-based RNAi systems utilizing short hairpin RNA (shRNA) have shown great promise for silencing nearly any gene and providing protein-level knockdown for a prolonged period. However, there are reported toxicity issues associated with shRNA, and non-optimized scaffolds may result in low levels of target gene knockdown while inducing off-target silencing. The SMARTvector™ technology addresses these shortcomings by expressing the shRNA sequence from an optimized micro-RNA based scaffold.