**2.1 Oligo-based therapeutics**

Oligonucleotides have several applications from encoding, transmitting and expressing genetic information to storage of information, disease diagnostics and even oligonucleotide-based therapeutics. As DNA, RNA is omnipresent in our body, due to its non-immunogenicity, and it also easily be exploited as cargo for drug delivery at specific locations of cellular organelles.

Among whole proteome of our body, only 10–14% of proteins have active binding sites which are "druggable" [3]. To address this issue, nucleic acid-based strategies can exploit translational machinery of the mammalian cells. Antisense oligonucleotides (ASOs) like short single-stranded DNA, phosphorothioate DNA, siRNAs, micro RNAs and locked nucleic acids are key players in drug development processes. There is plethora of ASO-based drugs approved by FDA against several diseases like Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (DMD), viral diseases, Type2 diabetes, cancer and others. However, poor cellular uptake and rapid degradation or renal filtration DNAbased therapeutics needs modification of delivery module to facilitate internalization and retain their active form [4].
