Background

Despite the existence of screening and biopsies, the lack of sensitive and affordable tools for early diagnosis and prognosis of aggressive primary cancer is the most important obstacle to reducing mortality and enhancing patient quality of life. Liquid biopsy offers a promising solution that facilitates non-invasive, facile measurement for cancer diagnosis, monitoring prognosis and validating the efficacy of a treatment over time. However, liquid biopsy is technically challenging because of the diminutive amount of circulating cancer cells in a high background of healthy cells, demanding a highly selective and sensitive analysis mechanism.

The team at the University of Strathclyde have successfully demonstrated a rapid and highly selective diagnostic tool for aggressive primary cancers, the main causes of mortality from cancer in Europe due to the lack of effective tools for early detection and monitoring of recurrence.

Technology Overview

Bespoke nanoprobe technology has been designed for the detection and analysis of RNA at the single cell level, with application in the early detection, prognosis, efficacy assessment and prediction of aggressive primary cancers.

Our liquid biopsy technology is a disruptive diagnostic that bridges a critical gap in technologies for the detection of molecular markers with minimal liquid biological samples. Our technology relies on bespoke RNA nanoprobes based on a novel type of nanoprobe to detect ribonucleic acid (RNA) biomarker at the single cell level through fluorescence detection systems such as flow cytometry and fluorescence microscopy. This allows analysis of the expression level of RNA biomarkers at the single cell level.

We plan to construct novel prototype fluorescence instrumentation to enable high throughput rapid quantitative RNA analysis at single cell level in conjunction with our RNA nanoprobes. Our nanoprobes have been shown to identify cancer molecular biomarkers in circulating tumour cells in blood.

Combining our nanoprobe assay with the quantitative analysis, our technology provides the opportunity for a game changing in vitro liquid biopsy diagnostic.

Benefits

Unprecedented opportunities for rapid detecting RNA in only small subsets of cells among large populations in liquid biopsy.

An affordable diagnostic technique for improved clinical decision making with global market potential.

Opportunity

The team are now looking for Licensees and partners to develop the technology further.

Bespoke RNA Nanoprobes for Early Cancer Detection Using Liquid Biopsy

Seeking