The difficulty of working with antibodies and the ease of working with aptamers.
Can you imagine selling a product for which you do not really know how much you are selling. Imagine having to describe the amount of product to clients by saying that you know that if you dilute it to a certain level it will stop working. This is accepted business practice for antibodies.
This is the accepted state of the antibody business because it is difficult to measure the binding affinity of a monoclonal antibody if you do not know how much you have, and it is difficult to determine how much you have a monoclonal antibody if you do not know the binding affinity. Really, the issue is a two-variable problem with only one equation…
Now imagine how you could eliminate the problems implicit in building a new diagnostic device if you knew how much of the ligand you were using, what the binding affinity was for the target, and what the binding affinities were for off-target molecules. You could intelligently develop new products by predicting performance rather than by testing a large range of permutations of ratios between capture and detection ligands.
This future is possible with aptamers. Given that aptamers are chemically synthesized, and the concentration of the product produced can be accurately measured simply at an absorbance of 260 nm, you know how much aptamer you have. Given that this is known you also know the aptamer binding affinity to the target and to off-targets. At NeoVentures we have developed chemistries that enable us to immobilize aptamers with high yield, and to measure the amount that is immobilized. Given that aptamers are immobilized in an oriented manner, by one end of the molecule, all of the immobilized aptamers will be functional.
Your use of aptamers will enable you to move diagnostic kit production from a dark art, to a scientifically driven plug and play process. This will not only save you money in product development but more importantly will allow you to develop products that perform optimally and consistently for your clients.
