Synthetic Nanobiotechnology and Biomachines, Synthetic Biology and Precision Medicine Centre, Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, Pretoria, South Africa.
Department of Biotechnology, College of Biological and Chemical Engineering, Addis Ababa Science and Technology University, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
Adv Exp Med Biol. 2023;1409:173-192. doi: 10.1007/5584_2022_732.
Early cancer identification is crucial for providing patients with safe and timely therapy. Highly dependable and adaptive technologies will be required to detect the presence of biological markers for cancer at very low levels in the early stages of tumor formation. These techniques have been shown to be beneficial in encouraging patients to develop early intervention plans, which could lead to an increase in the overall survival rate of cancer patients. Targeted drug delivery (TDD) using aptamer is promising due to its favorable properties. Aptamer is suitable for superior TDD system candidates due to its desirable properties including a high binding affinity and specificity, a low immunogenicity, and a chemical composition that can be simply changed.Due to these properties, aptamer-based TDD application has limited drug side effect along with organ damages. The development of aptasensor has been promising in TDD for cancer cell treatment. There are biomarkers and expressed molecules during cancer cell development; however, only few are addressed in aptamer detection study of those molecules. Its great potential of attachment of binding to specific target molecule made aptamer a reliable recognition element. Because of their unique physical, chemical, and biological features, aptamers have a lot of potential in cancer precision medicine.In this review, we summarized aptamer technology and its application in cancer. This includes advantages properties of aptamer technology over other molecules were thoroughly discussed. In addition, we have also elaborated the application of aptamer as a direct therapeutic function and as a targeted drug delivery molecule (aptasensor) in cancer cells with several examples in preclinical and clinical trials.
早期癌症的识别对于为患者提供安全和及时的治疗至关重要。需要高度可靠和适应性强的技术来检测肿瘤形成早期非常低水平的生物标志物的存在。这些技术已被证明有助于鼓励患者制定早期干预计划，从而提高癌症患者的总体生存率。基于适体的靶向药物输送（TDD）因其良好的特性而具有前景。适体由于其理想的特性，包括高结合亲和力和特异性、低免疫原性以及可简单改变的化学组成，非常适合作为优越的 TDD 系统候选物。由于这些特性，基于适体的 TDD 应用具有有限的药物副作用和器官损伤。适体传感器在癌症细胞治疗的 TDD 中具有广阔的发展前景。在癌细胞发育过程中有生物标志物和表达分子，但在那些分子的适体检测研究中只涉及少数。它与特定靶标分子结合的强大潜力使适体成为可靠的识别元件。由于其独特的物理、化学和生物特性，适体在癌症精准医学中有很大的潜力。在这篇综述中，我们总结了适体技术及其在癌症中的应用。这包括适体技术相对于其他分子的优势特性进行了深入讨论。此外，我们还详细阐述了适体作为直接治疗功能以及作为靶向药物输送分子（适体传感器）在癌症细胞中的应用，包括临床前和临床试验中的几个实例。
