It’s not easy living with sickle cell disease as a young adult. You’ve been in and out of hospital due to chest pain and difficulty breathing, and have probably missed a fair amount of school due to your health challenges. You’ve asked yourself many times: why is this happening to me? 

What is G6PD?

Glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase (G6PD) deficiency is an inherited blood disorder.

Therapeutic oligonucleotides are powerful and versatile biopolymers developed as drugs for clinical applications due to their straightforward synthesis and design. On the other hand, many of their most promising applications require therapeutic oligonucleotides to be stable in complex biological environments such as blood and living cells. The lifetime of administered oligonucleotides can be compromised significantly in vivo due to unintended interactions, for example, with enzymes that specifically degrade bacterial or viral DNA or RNA.1  

Deubiquitylating enzymes (DUBs) detach small ubiquitin modifications from protein substrates in eukaryotic cells. DUBs regulate many aspects of cell biology such as cell cycle progression, cell division, and differentiation.1 The role of DUBs in pathophysiology has evolved remarkably over the past several years. Defects in ubiquitylation processes have been linked to sporadic and genetic syndromes, as well as cancers and neurological disorders.2,3 

Guanine quadruplexes (G-quadruplexes or G4s) are unusual nucleic acid structures with distinct biological and chemical functions. They have occupied significant attention in the nucleic acid world since they were first identified in 1962 as the basis for the aggregation of 5’-guanosine monophosphate molecules.