[PNA--peptide nucleic acids. Towards gene therapeutic drugs]

The principles of gene therapeutic "antigen" and "antisense" drugs are briefly presented. The target of such drugs is the genetic material of the cell--either the DNA itself, or its messenger molecules, mRNA. By exploiting base-complementary principles, "antigen" and especially "antisense" drugs can easily be designed to target specific genes, the activity of which it is medically advantageous to inhibit. These could be virus- or oncogenes. In particular, the prospects of using peptide nucleic acids (PNA) as gene therapeutic drugs are discussed. PNA is a synthetic structural DNA mimic, which chemically is more closely related to peptides and proteins and which has so far shown very promising chemical and (molecular) biological properties in terms of its development into gene therapeutic drugs as well as diagnostic tools.