Gene Therapy for Advanced Melanoma: Selective Targeting and Therapeutic Nucleic Acids

Table 2

Different therapeutic strategies against melanoma based on nucleic acids. In the case of DNA-based approaches, a therapeutic gene is delivered to induce a beneficial effect, whereas with RNA based, generally the regimen, is based on silencing of a tumor-active gene. dsRNA mimetic pIC is, as yet, a recent and unique finding, based on polyinosine-polycytidylic acid (pIC) complexed with polyethyleneimine (PEI) that induces tumor cell autophagy and apoptosis. As for the case of micro RNAs (miR), only few in vitro studies have been conducted showing the therapeutic potential of the delivery of miRs that were found downregulated in tumor cells.

	Therapeutic/silenced/upregulated gene	Reference
DNA-based approaches	IL-12	[104–106]
	gp100	[107, 108]
	MART-1	[108]
	Tyrosinase	[109]
	IP-10	[110]
	HSV-tk	[111–113]
	N-Cadherin	[114]
	PAR-1	[115]
RNA-based approaches	RRM2	[92]
	Bcl2	[116]
	dsRNA pIC	[117, 118]
miR	Let-7b and miR 199a	[119, 120]