Built for the Lab of Tomorrow
We empower visionary teams with the most precise, adaptable, and intelligent binders to accelerate breakthroughs in diagnostics, therapeutics, and beyond.
For over four decades, antibodies and other amino-acid-based binders have dominated life science research, but their limitations in reproducibility, production complexity, and stability are becoming bottlenecks for modern labs.
Today’s innovators need faster, smarter, and more reliable tools.
Aptamers are built for the Lab of Tomorrow: fully synthetic, programmable, and stable by design. Whether you're targeting proteins, small molecules or cells, aptamers can be developed in weeks, fine-tuned by AI, and scaled effortlessly.
You can finally say goodbye to animal models, batch-to-batch variability and delays in your R&D pipeline.
A Needle in a Genomic Haystack
However, the traditional approach to designing aptamers is fundamentally broken: slow, expensive, and wildly inefficient. It's like finding a needle in a genomic haystack. There are two core problems with traditional aptamer design:
Problem 1 - SELEX is Outdated and Costly
The standard process for aptamer discovery (SELEX) relies on repetitive cycles of trial and error to enrich aptamers that bind to a target. But SELEX is painfully manual, taking over 6 months, $100,000, and demanding thousands of pipetting steps and human hours; all before you know if it even worked.
6 months, over $100,000 and 20% success rate, just for 1 characteristic: binding.
Problem 2 - There are more aptamer sequences than stars in the universe
The Search Space for aptamers is astronomically large. The sequence space of a 55-nucleotide aptamer is 4^55 (that's a 4 followed by 55, which is more that twice the number of stars in the universe). SELEX labs can only explore one-billionth of that space.
And even then, manual processes introduce random biases, structural blind spots, and inconsistent enrichment.
"It's like finding a needle in a genomic haystack, but with a blindfold on and with access to only a 1-billionth of it"
Moreover, this limited search space makes it nearly impossible to design aptamers that meet the functional characteristics needed for an aptamer to be truly functional.
In the Lab of Tomorrow, this is no longer acceptable.
Introducing PentaBind
We are the pioneers of AI-powered aptamer design, and the creators of Functional Aptamers™.
Through our 16-model AI architecture used in synergy with our wet lab, PentaBind overcomes the limitations of Legacy SELEX by designing aptamers with multiple functionalities in a single molecule and up to 20× faster than traditional SELEX campaigns.
Designing aptamers with such level of functionality using conventional methods would take 30 to 40 years of experimental work per aptamer.
PentaBind allowed us to find exceptional aptamers with higher binding affinity compared to the manually designed sequences, and did this in less than half the time and cost of manual experiments
Unprecedented Design
Our aptamers do more than bind. They combine multiple functional characteristics in one molecule, unlocking possibilities traditional modalities can’t reach.
Our aptamers bind with high affinity to complex targets, forming the foundation of programmable molecular interaction.
Our aptamers are designed not only to bind selectively, but to not bind to what they shouldn’t, ensuring unmatched molecular precision.
We program our aptamers to bind at specific sites, whether on a protein, or small molecule.
Engineered for structural stability, our aptamers remain functional in extreme biological and industrial environments.
We leverage aptamer folding to enable advanced applications like conformational switching, biosensing, and real-time hormone monitoring.
Our Workflow
As part of our Functional Aptamer™ Design, you will receive a shortlist of de novo sequences designed specifically for your needs. This service supports all aptamer applications, including diagnostics, therapeutics, bioprocessing, purification, and more.
1| You Confirm the Details
You provide the details of your target (protein or small molecule).
You can also provide a list of counter-targets to avoid and the matrices of interest you wish the Functional Aptamer™ to function in.
2| Feasibility Study & Convergence Analysis
We begin by generating initial wet-lab data using your target along with any optional counter-targets or matrices of interest to provide a starting point for our AI architecture. We then assess whether the aptamer data from the Feasibility Study shows meaningful convergence. If high convergence is achieved, we guarantee the performance of our Functional Aptamers™.
3| Functional Aptamer Design & Triaging
Our AI architecture generates de novo Functional Aptamers™, while our wet-laboratory triages down the top candidates into a high-functionality shortlist ready to share with you.
4| Next Steps
You evaluate your Functional Aptamers™ in-house, or request that PentaBind performs additional optimisation or characterisation.
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