Figure 4.

Tumor therapy using RNA interference: Bacterial vectors are transformed with an shRNA-encoding vector for intra-bacterial transcription. shRNA are expressed inside the vectors before release into the target tumour cell’s cytoplasm. Following bacterial lysis, the shRNA molecules are cleaved by Dicer into the corresponding siRNA molecules. The anti-sense strand of the siRNA specifically binds with its target mRNA, which is then degraded by the RNA-induced silencing (RISC) complex resulting to a post-transcriptional gene silencing or suppression.