Aptamers, the Nucleic Acid Antibodies, in Cancer Therapy

Abstract

This chapter outlines the general properties of the aptamer, the advantages and limitations of aptamers compared with monoclonal antibodies, and selected aptamers that have entered clinical trials or are under active investigation for cancer therapy. Aptamers are single-stranded nucleic acids that can recognize targets through three-dimensional complementarity and bind to targets with high specificity and affinity; hence, they have been described as nucleic acid antibodies. Bagalkot et al. investigated the targeted delivery of the chemotherapeutic drug Doxorubicin to cancer cells by using the prostate-specific membrane antigen aptamer A10. The platelet-derived growth factor (PDGF) aptamer has high promise to be used as an effective and specific inhibitor of PDGF in cancer therapy. More efforts should be devoted to the discovery of new anticancer aptamers, to the in-depth characterization of the current aptamers, and to speeding up the process for the entry of existing anticancer aptamers into clinical trials.