Diagnostic applications of gastric carcinoma cell aptamers in vitro and in vivo.

Gastric carcinoma is the most malignant tumor. Due to lacking of efficient means to diagnose the cancer at the early stage, it is necessary to develop effective molecular probes for early diagnosis and treatment. We have selected aptamers with high specificity and affinity against SGC7901 cells by cell-SELEX (Systematic Evolution of Ligands by Exponential Enrichment) method, which shown important clinical applications: (1) Specific recognize human gastric tumor tissues compared to the normal tissues. (2)When used to capture cancerous cells, the aptamer-functionalized fluorescent-magnetic nanospheres (FMNS) could specifically capture 93% target cancer cells and about 70% target cells can be released. (3) The aptamer probe displayed a quenched fluorescence in the absence of target cancer cells and went through a conformational transformation upon binding to target cancer cells that induced fluorescence. (4) The aptamer probe could target gastric tumors transplanted into mice with obvious fluorescence. The newly generated aptamers hold great potential in early cancer diagnosis.