Aptamers: a novel technology driving global renewable processes

Aptamer Solutions Ltd (AS) is a Yorkshire based start-up biotechnology company founded in 2012 developing an exciting market for the supply of custom nucleic acid aptamers for use in the life sciences sector. Based at York Science Park, AS custom select aptamers, a relatively new class of synthetic compounds that can be evolved to have strong affinity and specificity to proteins, peptides, cells, viruses and small molecules.

Our existing processes rely on PCR amplification and subsequent analysis of the products. As part of the development of our processes, we have shown that sampling at multiple points allows us to maintain quality of our process and steer the process toward a successful outcome. This is a lengthy process but is necessary to ensure that quality is maintained. These processes are no longer able to keep pace with the number of PCR cycles necessary to deliver high throughput analysis of control samples. We need to supplement our existing equipment with real-time automated PCR systems to allow simultaneous quantification of samples and comparison between samples at these various points in our process.