Analysis of therapeutic nucleic acids by capillary electrophoresis

Nucleic acids are getting increased attention to fulfill unmet medical needs. The past five years have seen more than ten FDA approvals of nucleic acid based therapeutics. New analytical challenges have been posed in discovery, characterization, quality control and bioanalysis of therapeutic nucleic acids. Capillary electrophoresis (CE) has proven to be an efficient separation technique and has been widely used for analyzing oligonucleotides and nucleic acids. This review discusses the recent technical advances of CE in nucleic acid analysis such as polymeric matrices, separation conditions and detection methods, and the applications of CE to various therapeutic nucleic acids including antisense oligonucleotide (ASO), small interfering ribonucleic acid (siRNA), messenger RNA (mRNA), gene editing tools such as clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)-based gene and cell therapy, and other nucleic acid related therapeutics.