Introduction
Dicerna Pharmaceuticals (DRNA) is a small-cap ($980M) developing RNA interference (RNAi) based therapeutics for rare and/or chronic diseases affecting the kidney and liver.
The mechanism of RNAi was first described in the late 1990s by Drs. Andrew Fire and Craig Mello. In 2006, the Nobel Prize community acknowledged the paradigm-changing seminal concept by jointly awarding both scientists the 2006 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. Their mechanism of degrading mRNA from a specific gene proposed that:
RNA interference is activated when RNA molecules occur as double-stranded pairs in the cell. Double-stranded RNA