New therapeutic opportunities for Hepatitis C based on small RNA

Figure 1 Novel anti-viral strategies based HCV life cycle. RNAi technology, inducing gene silencing at posttranscriptional level mediated by siRNA, can be applied to prevent HCV replication and infection by targeting either viral RNA (1) or host factors, such as surface receptor (2) or cellular molecules (3). miR-122 is a liver specific miRNA that is involved in HCV replication and therefore silencing of miR-122 by antisense oligonucleotides (ASO) could be considered as a potential therapeutic modality (4).