DNA Nanorobots for Screening and Monitoring of Noncommunicable Diseases

慢性病在世界范围内造成严重的残疾、痛苦和死亡，并对国家卫生系统造成严重的经济负担。如果及时发现，它们是可以预防、治疗甚至治愈的。虽然医学成像和手术组织活检仍然是疾病诊断的金标准，但这些方法不切实际，因为它们与风险、高成本和患者不便有关。由于易于采集血液样本，液体活检正在成为外科组织活检的更好选择。液体活检安全、无创、更方便、容易、可重复获得、更便宜，重要的是提供了个体患者疾病的更详细的分子和细胞表征。美国食品和药物管理局已经批准了几种液体活检检测作为前列腺癌、肺癌和乳腺癌等靶向癌症治疗的伴随诊断。然而，目前液体活检的诊断解决方案主要依赖于复杂的测序技术，这既耗时又需要大量的资本支出，还需要高素质的员工来运行和分析结果。这限制了液体活检的可用性，并导致诊断延误，从而增加治疗费用并降低患者存活率。Nanovery Limited成立于2018年，旨在开发一种新的诊断方法，使用DNA纳米机器人来靶向血液样本中存在的特定生物标志物（如DNA和RNA）。这将使临床医生能够以较少的时间和成本进行非侵入性液体活检，同时简化筛查、诊断和监测慢性病所需的工作流程。这种创新的方法是基于纳米机器人设备，将其添加到血液样本中以捕获疾病生物标志物。当纳米机器人与目标生物标志物结合时，它会产生易于读取的荧光信号。因此，即使在疾病的早期阶段，它也可以提供快速、准确和敏感的诊断。该项目的目标是进一步开发纳米机器人平台技术，并通过相关环境下的临床前评估来评估这种新方法的敏感性和特异性。Nanovery的目标是将其纳米机器人技术应用于肝病和前列腺癌，以解决目前慢性病筛查、诊断和监测方面的瓶颈，提供10倍便宜、100倍快的即时检测。

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.