Review and Monograph: Application of Nucleic Acid Aptamers in Molecular Medicine

Molecular medicine focus on understanding the diseases based on molecular level, and developing personalized medicine strategies for diagnostics and therapeutics. However, powerful molecular recognition tool is still limited for cancer diagnosis and therapy, which impeding cancer research. Aptamers are generated from systematic evolution of ligands by exponential enrichment (SELEX) also known as in vitro selection, ranging from synthetic single-stranded DNA, RNA or XNA (enhanced modified nucleotides), HNA (nucleotides of specific structures such as G quadruplex). The main advantages of aptamers including high specificity, high affinity, simple and rapid synthesis, easy chemical modification, wide target range, good tissue penetration and low immunogenicity. As a molecular recognition tool in molecular medicine, aptamer shows wide applications in developing personalized prediction, diagnosis and therapeutics for its high specificity and high affinity against target. This review discusses the applications of aptamers in disease diagnosis, including aptamer-based tumor marker discovery, liquid biopsy, and molecular imaging, Moreover, the applications of aptamer-based cancer therapy are reviewed, including aptamer-based inhibitors, aptameric drug conjugates, nanomedicines, and aptamer-mediated immunotherapy. Finally, it is promising aptamer will be extensively employed in the future including fundamental research, diagnosis and therapeutics. However, following issues are still need to be addressed. First, the application scenarios-dependent SELEX procedures lack studying which limits the clinical applications of aptamers. Second, the structure of aptamer-target complex has not been fully elucidated, which restricts the precise regulation of aptamers. Third, aptamer is easily degraded by enzymes in vivo and has a short half-life period, which hinders the applications of aptamer-drug conjugates in the development of targeted drugs. With the advancement of screening technology and the further enhancement of aptamer performance, it is expected that aptamers will find more extensive utilization in the field of molecular medicine in the future.