DNA Nanorobots for Screening and Monitoring of Noncommunicable Diseases

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Chronic diseases are responsible for significant incapacities, suffering, and deaths worldwide and impose a severe economic burden on the nation's health systems. They may be prevented, treated, or even cured if detected on time. While medical imaging and surgical tissue biopsies remain the gold standard in disease diagnostics, these approaches are impractical as they are associated with risks, high costs and inconvenience for patients.Given the ease of collecting blood samples, liquid biopsy is emerging as a superior alternative to surgical tissue biopsies. Liquid biopsy is safe, non-invasive, more convenient, readily, and repeatedly accessible, less expensive, and importantly provides a more detailed molecular and cellular representation of the individual patient's disease. US FDA has approved several liquid biopsy tests as companion diagnostics for targeted cancer therapies such as prostate, lung, and breast. However, current diagnostic solutions for liquid biopsies rely primarily on complex sequencing technologies that are time-consuming and require significant capital expenditure as well as highly qualified staff to run and analyse the results. This limits the availability of liquid biopsies and causes diagnostic delays which can increase treatment costs and decrease patient survival rates.Nanovery Limited was founded in 2018 to develop a novel diagnostic approach using DNA nanorobots to target specific biomarkers present in blood samples (such as DNA and RNA). This will enable clinicians to conduct the non-invasive liquid biopsies at a fraction of the time and cost while simplifying the workflow required for screening, diagnosis, and monitoring of chronic diseases. The innovative approach is based on nanorobot devices that are added to a blood sample to capture disease biomarkers. The nanorobot produces an easy-to-read fluorescent signal when it binds to the target biomarker if present. As such, it can provide rapid, accurate and sensitive diagnosis, even at an early stage of the disease.This project objective is to further develop a nanorobot platform technology and assess the sensitivity and specificity of this new approach via preclinical evaluation in relevant environments. Nanovery aims to exemplify its nanorobot technology in liver disease and prostate cancer to address current bottlenecks in screening, diagnosis and monitoring of chronic diseases, offering 10x cheaper and 100x faster point-of-care detection.