Therapeutic RNA Aptamers

Aptamers are RNA oligonucleotides that bind to a specific target with high affinity, and specificity and can thus be used to target therapeutically important proteins. Major efforts have recently been undertaken to create aptamers for a wide range of diseases using the experimentally laborious SELEX (systematic evolution of ligands by exponential enrichment). However, our robust computational aptamer design framework, involving construction of the aptamer structures, predicting their binding conformations, and optimizing their binding through mutations, is very useful in accelerating RNA aptamer-based therapeutics.