Developing drugs can be hit or miss, but now a tiny, DNA-based sensor may help streamline the task. Acting as a “fluorescent nanoantenna,” the sensor could flag in real time if a prospective drug is binding to its target or reveal other cellular activity.
For a study in Nature Methods, researchers put these new nanoantennas to work flagging when a particular digestive protein executed five different activities in a solution, such as reacting to antibodies and changing intestinal acidity. “It’s a nice tool in our toolbox,” says the study’s senior author Alexis Vallée-Bélisle, a nanotechnology researcher at the Université de Montréal.
Sensing structural changes in specific molecules has big implications for drug development, the study authors say. Vallée-Bélisle uses the example of a protein involved in turning cells cancerous. Researchers could introduce fluorescent nanoantennas to monitor whether a drug successfully blocks the cancer-causing protein from binding to a healthy cell analogue in the lab.
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