I-Corps: Fluorescent Probes for Molecular Diagnostics

这个i-Corps项目的更广泛的影响/商业潜力是产生技术，提高医疗诊断测试的准确性，并放松对从患者身上收集组织的限制。如果它可以通过商业化广泛传播，这项技术将允许患者获得更准确的癌症等疾病诊断，并以更快的周转时间和更低的医疗系统成本。此外，可以避免痛苦和昂贵的二次活组织检查或抽血。由于目前价值数十亿美元的诊断测试市场，以及明显迫切的临床需求，以填补限制癌症诊断测试准确性的技术空白，该项目具有非凡的商业化潜力。i-Corps项目专注于新一代发光纳米颗粒，它是在医学诊断测试中执行测量的关键手段。这些新的纳米粒子被称为量子点，它们提供了计算病变组织和血液中单个分子的新能力，与标准测试相比，这是诊断测试方面的重大飞跃，标准测试只提供“高”或“低”的定性结果。此外，量子点允许同时询问多种与疾病相关的分子，而不是必须进行重复测试。重要的是，这项技术可以在医疗诊断实验室中已经广泛使用的低成本仪器上实施，因此几乎没有阻碍进入市场的障碍。结果已经在研究实验室环境中得到了验证，但必须将其扩展到商业化，并进行精细调整，以满足医疗诊断环境中的特定需求。

The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project is to generate technology that improves the accuracy of medical diagnostic tests and eases restrictions on the collection of tissue from patients. If it can be widely disseminated through commercialization, this technology will allow patients to receive a more accurate diagnosis of diseases like cancer, with a more rapid turnaround time and lower cost to the healthcare system. Moreover, secondary biopsies or blood draws that are painful and expensive can be avoided. The project has exceptional potential for commercialization due to the multi-billion dollar market for diagnostic tests at present and due to clear pressing clinical needs to fill in technological gaps that limit the accuracy of diagnostic tests for cancer.The I-Corps project is focused on a new generation of light-emitting nanoparticles that function as the critical means to perform measurements in medical diagnostic tests. These new nanoparticles, called quantum dots, provide the new ability to count individual molecules in diseased tissue and in blood, which is a major leap forward in diagnostic testing compared with standard tests that simply provide a qualitative outcome of "high" or "low." Moreover, quantum dots allow the simultaneous interrogation of numerous classes of molecules related to diseases, instead of having to perform repeated tests. Importantly, this technology can be implemented on low-cost instruments that are already widely available in medical diagnostics labs, so there are few barriers preventing entry into the market. Outcomes have been validated in a research laboratory setting, however they must be scaled for commercialization and finely tuned to meet specific needs in medical diagnostics settings.