Unmet Need: Biomarkers are an incredibly important tool for diagnosing everything from autoimmune diseases, cancer, and metabolic disorders to creating personalized medicine and recommendations for certain treatments such as transplants, chemotherapy, vaccination, etc. Currently, most protein biomarker detection is still done by conventional protein detection assays, such as enzyme linked immunosorbent assays (ELISA). Oftentimes, these methods need specific antibodies, which can be expensive to acquire and difficult to handle, and require long periods of time with many steps to conduct the assay itself. Therefore, there exists a strong need for a precise, low cost biomarker detection method requiring minimal human intervention that does not use antibodies.
Technology Overview: Researchers at Johns Hopkins and the National Institute of Standards and Technology have developed a biomarker detection system, called ARTIST, that utilizes aptamers to detect the binding of proteins, leading to a change in fluorescent signal based on protein concentration. Contrary to other aptamer-based detection systems, ARTIST is unique in that it can be used with a broad variety of aptamers that require no special characteristics or modification . ARTIST can be coupled with downstream molecular circuits to build analog protein biosensors or digital protein biosensors with detection ranges that can be tuned over two orders of magnitude. ARTIST opens up a wide range of possibilities for creating massively multiplexed protein biomarker assays that are simple and straightforward to use.
Stage of Development: Researchers have verified ARTIST in vitro and were able to measure user-specific protein concentrations.
