Quantitative relationship between chemical properties and bioactivities of anti-microRNA oligonucleotides targeted to tumor-associated microRNA-21

Synthetic anti-microRNA oligonucleotides (AMOs) are promising drug candidates to inactivate disease-related microRNAs because of their sequence-specific binding to their targets and the variety of chemical modifications available. Over the last decade, the qualitative relationships between the chemical properties of AMOs and bioactivity (inactivation of their target miRNAs) have been studied to enhance their bioactivity. On the other hand, in real-world drug development, drugs must be designed case-by-case, taking many factors into account. Thus, in order to design AMOs that target specific miRNA, understanding the quantitative relationship between the chemical properties of AMOs and inactivation of their target miRNA is necessary. Here, we aimed to find the specific quantitative relationship of AMOs targeted to tumor-associated miR-21 through direct comparison of their inactivation efficacies with systematically varied chemical properties, including sequence-specific binding affinity, nuclease resistance, and RNase H activation. As a result, we newly found the quantitative relationships; (1) sequence-specific binding affinity of AMOs against miR-21 is the main determining factor for inactivation efficacy, (2) nuclease resistance of AMOs impacts their miR-21 inactivation efficacy acting cooperatively with the binding affinity, although nuclease resistance alone does not affect the miRNA inactivation efficacy, and (3) RNase H activation is unnecessary. This study also demonstrates the utility of the obtained relationship for the design of AMO-based drugs targeted to miR-21, through cell-based analyses. Thus, the obtained quantitative relationship would make it possible to predict the miR-21 inactivation efficacy of AMOs which are newly designed.