APTITUDE MEDICAL SYSTEMS INC — Department of Health and Human Services SBIR Phase I: DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Nucleic acid aptamers have shown great promise as the
APTITUDE MEDICAL SYSTEMS INC — SBIR Phase I award from Department of Health and Human Services.
- Amount
- $224,700
- Agency
- Department of Health and Human Services · National Institutes of Health
- Program / Phase
- SBIR · Phase I
- Solicitation
- PA13-088
- NAICS
- —
- Place of performance
- CA
- Period
- —
Description
DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Nucleic acid aptamers have shown great promise as the synthetic alternative to monoclonal antibodies in therapeutics, diagnostics, and RandD tools. Key advantages of aptamers comparing to antibodies include applicability to non-immunogenic targets, chemical and thermal stability, low production cost, and no batch-to-batch variation. Nevertheless, the potential of aptamers has not been fully realized due to the bottleneck in the discovery process: to date, the methods used to discover aptamers have been exclusively selection-based (i.e. SELEX). Unfortunately, these methods often fail to discover the highest performance aptamer in the starting library, due to a multitude of interfering factors such as library synthesis bias, PCR bias and non-specific binding. Furthermore, previous investigations suggest that these methods may discover DNA aptamers for only ~30% of the human proteome, greatly limiting aptamers' application scope. Previous innovations in the discovery proce