Beyond Affinity and Amplification: SPARK-seq and the Future of Clinical Laboratory Medicine

Le résumé fourni par la source

For decades, clinical laboratory medicine has relied on a limited set of molecular recognition strategies—principally antibodies, nucleic acid hybridization, and mass spectrometry—to translate biological signals into clinically actionable measurements. While these technologies have enabled remarkable advances in diagnostics and therapeutics, each faces inherent constraints related to scalability, specificity, or preservation of biological context. As precision medicine increasingly demands molecular tools capable of resolving cellular heterogeneity and detecting low-abundance biomarkers in complex clinical matrices, there is renewed interest in alternative binding modalities that can meet the analytical performance specifications required for regulated diagnostic environments. Aptamers have long been proposed as such an alternative. Despite theoretical advantages, including chemical stability, ease of modification, and scalable synthesis, their clinical impact, particularly in regulated diagnostic environments, has remained modest compared with antibody-based technologies. This gap reflects not conceptual failure, but practical limitations: conventional selection approaches are low throughput, poorly preserve native protein conformations, and rarely link binding events to cellular phenotype. Consequently, aptamer discovery has struggled to keep pace with the expanding complexity of clinical biomarker landscapes.

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