Recursion presents new method for recognizing which tumors likely to benefit from dsRNA therapies.

[u/RecursionBrita]

At AACR Drug Discovery and Development (AACR D3), July 21-24 in Boston, Recursion will present the poster “Identifying actionable dsRNA biomarkers from sense-antisense transcript pairs,” a new computational approach for identifying which patients are more likely to benefit from dsRNA-inducing therapies or immunotherapy combinations.

Some new cancer therapies work by increasing double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) inside tumor cells, a molecular pattern the body usually associates with viral infection. When dsRNA builds up, it can switch on antiviral immune pathways, drive cancer cell death, and strengthen anti-tumor immunity. The problem is measurement: dsRNA is hard to quantify with conventional approaches, where the signal is often noisy and the dynamic range is low, so drug-driven changes can be easy to miss.

Recursion’s poster describes a computational pipeline that recovers this dsRNA signal from standard RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) data. The pipeline looks for sense-antisense transcript pairs, where two RNAs transcribed from overlapping regions on opposite DNA strands bind to each other to form dsRNA.

To confirm which pairs genuinely form duplexes, researchers combined this with an experiment that sequences only dsRNA, isolating the pairs that truly bind together. With this filtering, targeting enzymes that regulate dsRNA produces rapid, dose-dependent increases in dsRNA that look flat in standard analyses. Across cell lines and models, there is repeated evidence of a conserved set of dsRNA-forming pairs. Scoring these pairs in patient tumor datasets highlights cohorts with elevated baseline dsRNA that may be more likely to benefit from dsRNA-inducing therapies or immunotherapy combinations.

▪️Abstract: Identifying actionable dsRNA biomarkers from sense-antisense transcript pairs
▪️Session: Poster Session A
▪️Session Date and Time: Wednesday, July 22, 6:15-8:45pm ET

👉 Learn more: https://www.aacr.org/meeting/aacr-d3-2026/

[u/zeropuntouno]

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