RNA Therapeutics and Disease: A New Frontier in Medicine

Dear Colleagues,

The boost of high-throughput technologies in the last decade has revealed a plethora of unexpected RNAs with no obvious coding capacities, termed noncoding RNAs (ncRNAs). This noncoding transcription, for a long time deemed to be nothing more than “transcriptional noise”, has been demonstrated to play critical roles across multiple biological pathways through a variety of different mechanisms—for instance, by regulating chromatin modifications, or by affecting mRNA stability and translation. Long and short ncRNAs regulate gene expression at almost every step. The revolution in RNA biology and the introduction of novel RNA-based gene editing approaches (i.e., CRISPR) have ushered in the new era of RNA therapeutics. These molecules mimic or antagonize the function of natural existing ncRNAs.

By tapping into RNA biology, RNA-based drugs are emerging as an innovative, precise, and broad approach for the treatment of pathological conditions such as hepatic viruses, liver-centric genetic diseases, cancer, cardiometabolic or neurological disorders, and, more recently, as a novel platform for vaccine development. Hence, RNA-based drugs hold promise to expand the domain of “druggable” targets beyond that of conventional small molecules and biologics.

This Special Issue aims at elucidating the latest advances in RNA Therapeutics (including small interfering RNAs (siRNAs), microRNAs (miRs)/antimiRs, mRNA, antisense oligonucleotides (ASO), aptamers, and CRISPR-based approaches) in diseases. We welcome the submission of both original research and review articles discussing the state-of-the-art of RNA-based drugs with potential clinical benefits in areas related to cancer, immunotherapy, neurology, metabolic disorders, and infectious diseases.

Dr. Annalisa Di Ruscio
Dr. Carla Lucia Esposito
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Molecules is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.