“The good thing about small molecules is they go everywhere. The bad things about small molecules is they go everywhere, right? … They almost always do what you want them to do, but they'll do 19 other things.”
The BioCentury Show · October 2026
Asked whether there could be a single way to deliver siRNA to every tissue, the Arrowhead CEO says no, and argues that is a good thing. Targeted delivery plus RNAi's gene-level precision gives two separate levers for specificity, where small-molecule drugs often fail on side effects.
Transcript
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…your mind as to what the sort of optimal design or technology would be for delivering sRNA to a broad array of tissue types? I know there might not be something that fits every single tissue type, but is there something that could really advance the field further on and what that might look like?
…was, I wish there was one thing you could stick on to these sRNA molecules and it's going to get you to everywhere you want to go, but there's not. You know, it just, you know, it's just a fact that we're going to need slightly different or vastly different approaches to get to different cell types. So that sounds like a challenge, but actually, I think that's a good thing, right? You know, the good thing about small molecules is they go everywhere. The bad things about small molecules is they go everywhere, right? You know, the reason the small molecules drug, the small molecule drugs fail is not generally because they don't do what you want them to do. They almost always do what you want them to do, but they'll do 19 other things. And some of those things may be toxic and you don't want that to happen. And one of the reasons for that is that they go everywhere and it's hard to predict how a certain…
Right, right. Yeah. And just maybe just to review for our listeners, just the strides you have made with regard to delivery. So, we already mentioned, obviously, the news yesterday about the MAP T data, which gets, you know, as you say, sort of establishes the opportunity for a platform approach to…
Cardiomyocytes, although we're not in the clinic there yet, back of the eye, we're not in the clinic there yet. Muscle. Skeleton muscle. Yeah, skeleton muscle is.
Right. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So already showing some pretty impressive sort of ability to sort of push beyond the liver, which obviously is where, you know, I think a lot of the promise can come from. But, you know, if Arrowhead or the field, you know, are able to solve that delivery to most tissue…