Cancer therapy
Today, cancer therapy is based primarily on
chemotherapy and radiation, both of which have well-established side effects.
Chemotherapy drugs typically kill not only cancer cells but also normal cells,
and administration of bolus doses of these strong drugs can result in
unpredictable side effects. One way of generating effective molecular probes
to differentiate diseased cells is to use aptamers, that are capable of identifying
molecular level differences between a healthy cell and a diseased cell
Aptamer−drug conjugates (ApDCs) have been developed to exploit aptamer-based targeted drug delivery. Current ApDC technologies largely rely on the noncovalent association of drug and specific DNA sequences,or complicated and less efficient organic synthesis.These technologies suffer from complicated preparation, low controllability of site-specific drug conjugation on vehicles, low synthesis yield in some cases, low drug loading capacity and the accompanying high cost and low spatiotemporal controllability in drug release
Nucleolin Aptamer-Paclitaxel Conjugate - Aptamers in Cancer therapy