The use of the traditional SELEX method for aptamer development has led to the identification of aptamers that bind to a wide diversity of targets. However, there has been limited success with aptamers in therapeutic and diagnostic applications. A key advantage of aptamer development over… Read More »Announcing The Future of Aptamers: Neomers
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 »Why Do Antibodies Perform Better in Matrices than Aptamers?
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?
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 »How do Aptamers and Antibodies Work?
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?
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?
This is the first of several blogs we will share on our new Neomer process. The image above can be compared to a dilemma in traditional aptamer selection: are the aptamers that are enriching the product of the selection process (I would vote for the… Read More »How We Overcome Process Bias with Neomers
