Technology Review (MIT) -- Antibodies aren’t a critical part of the body’s defense against disease: they’re also the gold standard for biosensing. These natural proteins are widely used in diagnostic tests for cancer and other diseases because they recognize and bind so efficiently to disease markers, which include bacterial and viral proteins and protein fragments. However, protein antibodies are expensive to synthesize in the lab and only last a few months. Now biochemists have developed a method to make artificial antibodies that may be just as effective as the real thing.
