The clear winner of our poll on antibody specificity was that antibodies have evolved to ignore HAS/IgG. I struggle with this, as I think it is too simple. Really, the way that antibodies rearrange to detect foreign antigens is open; there are no barriers to… Read More »Antibody Specificity
The aptamer market has been growing steadily as there has been increasing awareness of the advantages of aptamers in diagnostic and therapeutic platforms. It has been reported that the global aptamer marker has been forecasted to at least double in value over the next 5… Read More »The Aptamer Market
The shape of an aptamer is very important for its binding affinity to the target. This is because the shape allows it to ‘fit’ into a target, but also orients the nucleotides involved in binding in a way that optimizes binding interactions. For aptamers to… Read More »Aptamer Design
Finding a diagnostic reagent that is right for a point-of-care application can be tricky due to the long list of obstacles that need to be overcome. The reagent needs to be shelf-stable, give reproducibly sensitive and selective results, be easy to synthesize, and most importantly,… Read More »What is An Aptamer?
Designing aptamers for specific targets needs to be done in a way that ensures you are selecting the aptamers that bind to your target while easily getting rid of those sequences that do not. Typically, this is done by immobilizing the target so that aptamers… Read More »FRELEX: Solving the Challenges of Immobilizing Targets
In this blog series we will provide a comprehensive review of how aptamers work by comparing and contrasting them with antibodies. We consider antibodies to be equivalent to aliens and aptamers are our heroes, the cowboys, and of course we all know that the cowboys… Read More »Aptamers vs Antibodies Part 1: Cowboys and Aliens
The relationship between structure and function is pretty obvious in a lot of engineering projects. Clearly the same is true for aptamers. The functionality of an aptamer is based entirely on it’s structure. In this series of blogs we are going to reveal how we… Read More »Aptamer Structure Prediction
I love the confidence of those responding. Basically the winning category was that aptamers work great, they just have not been tried in enough applications. In my opinion, we should have provided a fifth option in this poll, All of the above… Successful monoclonal antibody… Read More »Why Have Aptamers Not Been More Successful in Therapeutics?
This blog starts with a portrait of Claude Louis Berthollet (1748 – 1872), who was the first to demonstrate and elaborate on the concept of chemical reversibility. As an aside, it should be noted that he accompanied Napoleon to Egypt and, along with Joseph Fourier,… Read More »The Concept of Chemical Reversibility and Implications for Commercial Aptamer Diagnostics
Thanks to all who participated in our poll on why aptamers have not been commercialized in diagnostic applications. The most popular response was platforms are designed for antibodies. I will avoid commenting on the vested interest of the Illuminati because I do not want to… Read More »Why Have Aptamers Not Been Commercialized in Diagnostic Applications?