Evolution of DNA aptamers for malignant brain tumor gliosarcoma cell recognition and clinical tissue imaging

Gliosarcoma, a variant of glioblastoma multiforme (GBM), is a highly invasive malignant tumor. Unfortunately, this disease still marked by poor prognosis regardless of modern treatments. It is of great significance to discover specific molecular probes targeting gliosarcoma for early cancer diagnosis and therapy. Herein, we have selected a group of DNA aptamers with high affinity and selectivity against gliosarcoma cells K308 using cell-SELEX. All the dissociation constants of these aptamers against gliosarcoma cells were in the nanomolar range and aptamer WQY-9 has the highest affinity and good selectivity among them. Furthermore, truncated aptamer sequence, WQY-9-B, shows similar recognition ability to aptamer WQY-9. In addition, WQY-9-B was found to be able to bind selectively and internalize into cytoplasm of target cancer cell at 37 °C. More importantly, compared to a random sequence, aptamer WQY-9-B showed excellent recognition rate (73.3%) for tissue sections of clinical gliosarcoma samples. These data suggests that aptamer WQY-9-B has excellent potential as an effective molecular probe for gliosarcoma diagnosis.