San Diego startup Regulus, founded in 2007, has quietly been working on a new way to target RNA for drug development. The company has been studying a subset of RNA molecules called microRNAs, or miRNAs. First discovered in the 1990s, misbehaving miRNAs have been linked to several diseases, including cancer and heart failure. Drug developers hope these molecules will prove to be particularly effective drug targets because manipulating just one seems to suppress several disease-linked proteins–whereas most biotech drugs only target individual proteins.

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