Figure 2. miRNA modulation strategies for therapeutic intervention.

(A). miRNA inhibition. (1) Antagomirs are synthetic, single-stranded RNA-based oligonucleotides that are complementary to mature endogenous miRNAs, allowing for binding and silencing of their targets. (2) miRNA sponges contain multiple binding sites to an miRNA of interest, competitively inhibiting it from binding to its target mRNA. As the binding sites are specific to an miRNA’s seed region, sponges can inhibit an entire family of related miRNAs. (B) miRNA mimics are synthetic, double-stranded RNA molecules that have identical sequences to their naturally occurring equivalents, allowing for restoration or amplification of the activity of a target miRNA. Figure was reproduced with permission of Dr. Kumar [2].