Aptagen – aptamer-beacon

Aptagen is a biotech company proposing aptamer products and services as reagents, diagnostic and biomarker discovery tools. Aptamers are used in drug discovery, targeted delivery for therapeutics or bioindustrial applications.

Aptagen – aptamer-beacon

Aptagen

Aptamers (synthetic antibodies) are ligands of RNA, DNA, and peptide oligonucleotides binding a variety of target antigens. Aptazymes are aptamers with enzymatic activity. One reason for the tremendous interest in aptamers is the practical advantage of an aptamer over an antibody. Unlike the time and costs associated for producing a protein-based antibody, an aptamer can be synthesized quickly and cheaply using an automated oligo synthesizer. Aptagen’s engineering capabilities include allosteric ribozymes, molecular switches, and molecular beacons. Indeed, Aptagen manufactures Apta-beacons, an innovative approach to detect analytes in any sample type. An Apta-beacon is a nucleic acid based molecule comprised of two functional groups: an aptamer-target binding domain and a self-cleaving ribozyme domain. Aptagen’s aptamer-beacon translates a binding event in a reporter signal (a measurable fluorescent indicator). The aptamer domain acts as the docking point for target interaction. Under target bound conditions, an Apta-beacon undergoes a conformational shift that stabilizes the ribozyme structure and thus results in a cleavage event on the 3’-end of the molecule. This fluorescent signal can be easily detected using a microplate reader or a fluorometer. Furthermore, Aptagen also offers the Apta-index (Aptamer Database), the most advanced database on aptamers containing information obtained from the published literature.

Aptagen is a biotech company headquartered in Jacobus (USA). Management Team is composed by Thomas Caltagirone, Michelle Young, Weihua Pan and Albert Liao. Aptagen was founded in 2004 and plays a leading role in developing aptamers for treatment and diagnosis of various diseases. Using the current antibody method, hundreds of promising candidates working in-vitro fail during animal ADMET studies, with an average failure rate of 80%. Because aptamers are an in-vivo approach directly tested in the animal model, they avoid the majority of bench testing (saving approximately 35% of the R&D cost).

More about Aptagen : http://aptagen.com

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