Aptamer-Based Targeted Conjugates for Diagnostic and Therapeutic Applications, 2nd Edition
A special issue of Pharmaceutics (ISSN 1999-4923). This special issue belongs to the section "Drug Targeting and Design".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 December 2022) | Viewed by 3770
Special Issue Editors
Interests: cell-SELEX; cancer biomarker discovery; cancer cell biology and signalling; targeted therapy; chemotherapy resistance
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Interests: aptamers; cell-SELEX technology; cancer-cell biology and signaling; targeted delivery system; targeted therapy
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
The mainstay of a therapeutic intervention is to specifically target diseased cells or tissues at a high accuracy and with a low frequency of adverse side effects. One possibility to reach this goal is to use disease-specific ligands as delivery agents to drive therapeutic cargos to the diseased sites, without compromising the healthy ones. Oligonucleotide aptamers, analogous to protein antibodies, closely interact with their targets as a result of their complex shapes, thus representing a useful class of molecular recognition probes in various diagnostic and therapeutic applications. The rapid chemical production, design flexibility, and versatile chemical modification that allow different conjugation chemistries, renders aptamers as ideal targeting moieties in advanced targeted delivery strategies. Antibody-based targeted therapeutics provide high target specificity and affinity. However, their potential for immunogenicity is of great concern, as this is the reason for their high production cost; these problems may therefore limit their clinical applicability. Conversely, active disease targeting by aptamers, while preserving affinity and specificity similar to monoclonal antibodies, presents several advantages over them, including a smaller size, higher stability, cheaper cost for synthesis, minimal inter-batch variability, and lack of immunogenicity. The development of actively targeted aptamer-based therapeutics, therefore, improves methods for the delivery of conventional drugs and innovative therapeutics, and opens the possibility to access lower costs and highly effective therapies. The present Special Issue will include original research articles and review articles aimed at covering new synthetic methodologies of aptamer conjugates as well as their novel applications.
Dr. Laura Cerchia
Dr. Simona Camorani
Guest Editors
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Keywords
- aptamer-targeted nanosystems
- aptamer–drug conjugates
- bifunctional aptamers
- aptamer–antibody
- aptamer–enzyme
- targeted therapy
- targeted imaging
- targeted delivery systems
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