This laboratory aims to develop technologies enabling cell-specific delivery of nucleic acid therapeutic agents for personalized cancer therapy. Oligonucleotides of different sequences can fold into different conformations to bind to their protein targets with high specificity and affinity. These structured oligonucleotides are known as aptamers. This laboratory has integrated bioinformatics, genomics, and proteomics technologies to identify several surface marker proteins on cancer cells. Functional aptamers specific to cancer cell surface marker proteins are employed to deliver siRNAs and/or DNAzymes into cancer cells by the receptor mediated endocytosis process to knock down the metastasis and cell proliferation associated signaling pathways. Cocktail therapy using cancer cell-specific aptamers conjugated with different allele-specific and/or transcript-specific nucleic acid therapeutic agents against various pivotal gene transcripts are being devised to knock down signaling pathways involved in the metastasis cascade and cell proliferation. The goal of these studies is to develop novel therapeutics to inhibit metastasis and to eradicate cancer cells with minimal side effects by synthetic lethal killing and allele-specific or transcript-specific therapeutic agents.