Therapeutics and Diagnostics

One of the missions of the Biological Sciences group is to develop novel therapeutic and diagnostic approaches for cancer, neurological disease and biowarfare agent exposure. Recent research at PSI has focused on the use of DNA and RNA aptamers for targeting cell proteins with high specificity. Those aptamers are used for developing molecularly targeted contrast agents for breast and ovarian cancer and could potentially be used to target cancer therapeutic agents to tumor cells. In other research aptamers are used to inhibit activity of enzymes involved in human disease.

Aptamer development typically involved many rounds of enrichment for specific binders from large pools of oligonucleotides. This process is time consuming and inefficient. PSI is developing a novel, NON-SELEX technology for single-step selection of aptamers with a desired binding affinity.