Cell-Internalization SELEX of RNA Aptamers as a Starting Point for Prostate Cancer Research

In the treatment of cancer, over the last decade different drugs delivery systems have been developed to increase therapeutic specificity to improve drug's efficacy, and safety by increasing bioavailability. Among these systems, small nucleic acid molecules with a three-dimensional structure, known as aptamers, have shown several advantages. Several approaches to design aptamers require modifications from starting libraries of DNA sequences. Here, we describe cell-internalization SELEX (Systematic Evolution of Ligands by Exponential Enrichment), a sophisticated technique based on RNA aptamers as a starting point, that enables design functional aptamers as drug-delivery tools. This variation of the original SELEX technique using RNA aptamers instead DNA aptamers allows to obtain aptamers that are internalized in prostate cancer cells using as a starting point an RNA aptamer library with 76 nucleotides. The major advantage of this technique is that modifications are not required in the initial library, as initial T7 transcription promoter or 2'F nucleotides before sequencing.