Producing Synthetic Antibody Substitutes.

• Position: Brief Article

Researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas have come up with a method that may lead to the long-hoped-for efficient and inexpensive production of synthetic antibody substitutes for use in medical diagnostics, biotechnology, and biomedical research. (Antibodies recognize and then bind tightly to foreign substances, or antigens, in the body, setting up an immune response to fight illnesses. Antibodies also can be cloned to use as probes to diagnose illnesses or to study antigens in the laboratory.)

The researchers established a selection system to find peptides that mimic antibodies by binding to specific peptide epitopes--amino-acid. compounds that can combine with antibodies. They were interested in discovering relatively small molecules, such as peptides, that could substitute for antibodies, which are crucial proteins in biomedical science, but are fragile, and time-consuming and expensive to make.

"The core of this research is to devise a way to design relatively small molecules that aren't proteins, but can recognize a particular run of amino acids, or an epitope," explains Thomas Kodadek, professor of internal medicine and biochemistry and an investigator for the Center for Biomedical Inventions. "This is important because antibodies are...