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Small interfering RNAs (siRNA) are able to activate the mammalian innate immune system depending on their structure, sequence, and method of delivery. The immunostimulatory activity of double-stranded RNA can be applied to antiviral and antitumor therapy. Here we identified a set of 19-bp RNA duplexes with 3-nucleotid overhangs in the 3' ends that display immunostimulating activity (here and after immunostimulating RNA, or isRNA) and studied their sequence/activity relationships. It was found that the introduction of substitutions in the middle part of the isRNA sequence (10-16 positions counting from the 5' end of strand 1) does not alter the antiproliferative activity, while substitutions in the 3' end region of isRNA substantially reduce it. isRNAs efficiently inhibit the proliferation of human oral epidermoid carcinoma cells [half-maximal inhibitory concentration (IC(50)) values varied from 10 to 100 nM]. Our research demonstrated that antiproliferative effects of isRNAs are related to cell growth arrest, rather than the induction of apoptosis. These isRNAs strongly stimulate the synthesis of interferon-α (IFN-α), and to a lesser extent the synthesis of tumor necrosis factor (TNF-α) and interleukin-6 (IL-6), in adherent peripheral blood mononuclear cells. An intravenous injection of isRNA/Lipofectamine complexes into C57BL mice increases IFN-α and IL-6 levels in the blood serum up to 15-fold and 3-fold, respectively, compared to the control mice. The results obtained clearly demonstrate the pronounced immunostimulatory and antiproliferative properties of the isRNAs under study. Hence, these short double-stranded RNAs can be considered as potential agents for the therapy of oncological and viral diseases.

Experimental animal model of tumor progression based on mice lymphosarcoma (LS) and resistant lymphosarcoma (RLS) has been developed. LS tumor displays high sensitivity to cyclophosphamide, which is widely used in anticancer therapy. RLS tumor was derived from LS by passaging in mice receiving low concentration of cyclophosphamide (20 mg/kg) and display resistance to cyclophosphamide (up to dose 150 mg/kg). The primary cultures of LS and RLS tumors display different expression levels of the genes related to apoptosis and multiple drug-resistant phenotype: in RLS tumor high levels of mdr1b and bcl-2 genes and low level of p53 gene expression were found. A total of 10% of cells in RLS primary culture display multiple drug-resistant phenotype and survive even at high dose of cytostatics. Cultivation of RLS primary culture in the presence of increasing vinblastine concentrations gives RLS(40) cell culture, which exhibits high levels of mdr1a/1b genes expression as compared to RLS and 20-fold increase of resistance to cytostatics. Drug-resistant RLS(40) cells were transplanted into CBA mice and sensitivity of the tumors to anticancer drugs was tested. RLS(40) tumors were resistant to a number of cytostatics used in anticancer therapy (cyclophosphamide, cysplatin, vinblastine, rubomycinum). Thus, RLS(40) tumor can be used as model, which corresponds to tumor status observed in patients after one or several courses of chemotherapy and can be useful for testing conventional therapy alone or together with newly developed gene-targeted therapeutics.

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