Aptamers in the diagnosis and treatment of coronavirus (search done on 21 June 2020)
Citation: Torabi R, Ranjbar R, Halaji M, et al. Aptamers, the bivalent agents as probes and therapies for coronavirus infections: A systematic review. Molecular and cellular probes. 2020 Oct;53:101636.
What is this? COVID-19 is a novel infection and research into diagnostic features and possible treatments, such as aptamer-based biosensors and drugs, is important for policy makers.
In this rapid review, the authors searched for studies on the use of aptamers for the diagnosis and treatment of coronaviruses. They did not restrict their searches by date, type or language of publication and did the most recent search on 21 June 2020. They included 3 studies on diagnostic aptamers and 2 studies on therapeutic aptamers.
What was found: At the time of this review, the included studies suggested that aptamer molecules might be effective anti-coronavirus agents in both diagnosis and treatment.