https://phys.org/news/2018-07-unraveling-immune-recognition-nucleic-acid.html

The findings were recently reported by Enping Hong, Ankit Shah, and Marina Dobrovolskaia of the Frederick Laboratory for Cancer Research, Emil Khisamutdinov of Ball State University and Justin Halman and Kirill Afonin of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in the journal Nano Letters.

The idea has been around for a while that selected segments of RNA or DNA could be used therapeutically—therapeutic nucleic acids—to affect gene or cell function. Unfortunately, in clinical trials most of these proposed therapeutic molecules have proved to have an extreme side effect—they provoked a strong, often fatal reaction from the human body's immune cells.