Progress with ribozymes

Ribozyme Pharmaceuticals Inc. was one of the many companies that went public in the mid-1990s with very early-stage technology. Since then, progress in delivering ribozymes to cells and improvements in their half-life have removed some important hurdles to development of ribozymes as therapeutics.

see B4). Ribozymes are RNA-based enzymes that bind RNA sequences and cut them. According to President and CEO Ralph Christoffersen, researchers could not even make the enzymes when the company was founded in 1992. As a result of technical progress at RZYM, however, the pace of product development has picked up to the extent that the company now anticipates being able to file an IND each year for a new product going forward...