查看文章

Tracking antimalarial drug use and efficacy is essential for monitoring the current spread of antimalarial drug resistance. However, available methods for determining tablet quality and patient drug use are often inaccessible, requiring well-equipped laboratories capable of performing liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry (LC-MS). Here, we report the development of aptamer-based fluorescent sensors for the rapid, specific detection of the antimalarial compounds piperaquine and mefloquine—two slow-clearing partner drugs in current first-line artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACTs). Highly selective DNA aptamers were identified that bind piperaquine and mefloquine with dissociation constants (K_d’s) measured in the low nanomolar range via two independent methods. The aptamers were isolated from a library of single-stranded DNA molecules using a capture–systematic evolution of ligands by …