Here's Your Effing Jetpack: Plastic Antibodies!

[athelind]

Plastic Antibodies Effective In Living Animals!
Natural antibodies are proteins that are shaped to wrap around the molecules of a dangerous substance. The body has to be exposed to the substance to learn how to make them, and the immune system responses involved in the process can contribute to the trauma. Thing like antivenom serums are currently

Comments

[archteryx]

Even if they don't make it into in vivo use, they'll really make it much easier to do alot of scientific research. I can see Abcam and Santa Cruz Biotech being all over this.

[terminotaur]

(right up my area of knowledge for a change. :) )
This is quite exciting. I admit when I first heard it I was skeptical about the impact, but reading the article this is quite a good move.

It will depend the cost of the procedure to create these, but it would be so much easier (and animal friendly) to produce research antibodies, and with much less worry of cross-reactivity. Less animals used too.

From a medical standpoint more than one study will have to be done to confirm safety, but this looks to be full of awesome. Why? Because if you can create this binding structure, tweaking it should be easier than tweaking the antibody as we've been doing.

The one real possible limitation could be isolating protein in native forms that would occur in the body. We can know the sequence, but larger scale synthesis/purification of protein will probably be the limiting step. Also, the right shape is one thing, but I'm just wondering how sticky it will be for the target protein (I'll read the paper soon).

[siege]

As a couple of folks have mentioned indirectly, this will be incredibly wonderful provided it has no toxic behaviors (such as sticking to inappropriate chemicals or otherwise interrupting bodily processes).