AI-accelerated Biosensor Design

Apply artificial intelligence (AI) to accelerate the design of highly specific, engineered biomarkers for rapid virus detection. Description: This SBIR seeks to leverage AI technologies to accelerate the development of aptamer-based biosensors that specifically bind to biomolecular structures. Aptamers are short single-stranded nucleic acid sequences capable of binding three-dimensional biomolecular structures in a way similar to antibodies. Aptamers have several advantages as compared to antibodies, including long shelf-life, stability at room temperature, low/no immunogenicity, and low-cost. The current state-of-the-art aptamer designs rely heavily on in vitro approaches such as SELEX (Systematic Evolution of Ligands by Exponential Enrichment) and its advanced variations. SELEX is a cyclic process that involves multiple rounds of selection and amplification over a very large number of candidates (>10^15). The iterative and experimental nature of SELEX makes it time consuming (weeks to months) to obtain aptamer candidates, and the overall probability of ultimately obtaining a useful aptamer is low (30%-50%). Attempts to improve the performance of the original SELEX process generally result in increased system complexity and system cost as well as increased demand on special domain expertise for their use. Furthermore, a large number of parameters can influence the SELEX process. Therefore, this is a domain that is ripe for AI. Recent AI research has demonstrated the potential for machine learning technologies to encode domain knowledge to significantly constrain the solution space of optimization search problems such as solving the biomolecular inverse problems. Such in silico techniques consequently offer the potential to provide a cost-effective alternative to make aptamer design process more dependable, thereby, more efficient. This SBIR seeks to leverage emerging AI technologies to develop a desktop-based AI-assisted aptamer design capability that accelerates the identification of high-performance aptamers for detecting new biological antigens.