Acoustic Separation of Cancer-derived Extracellular Vesicles for Cancer Early Diagnostics

EPSRC投资组合研究领域：该项目与射频和微波设备（增长），传感器和仪器（维护），微系统（维护）和临床技术（维护）相一致。描述：当原发肿瘤从最初开始的地方扩散到身体的另一个地方时，癌症就会危及生命。扩散过程称为转移，癌细胞扩散形成的肿瘤称为转移性肿瘤。转移是侵袭性癌症患者死亡的主要原因。目前，对于转移性癌症患者尚无治愈性治疗方法。这清楚地表明，迫切需要增加对肿瘤细胞和正常细胞之间的细胞通讯机制的了解，从而导致转移部位的病理代谢。细胞外囊泡（EVs）是一种独特的内吞起源的膜性囊泡。它们的直径从30到150纳米不等，由细胞内多泡体与质膜融合后释放。声波已被应用于细胞等生物粒子的高灵敏度分离。通过增加声波的频率，他们能够从全血中分离出癌症衍生的ev亚群。拟议的项目将建立在主管现有技术的基础上，将制造一种集成声学和微流体技术的高频声学换能器，以识别和分离癌症衍生的EV亚群。将该方法与传统的体外离心分离方法进行比较，考察其敏感性和特异性。在初步的临床研究中，将采集癌症患者的血液来测试这种传感器。该换能器将是一种综合的、敏感的替代诊断技术，针对系统水平的循环肿瘤生物标志物，允许研究ev在癌症进展和治疗反应中的基本作用。候选人将在一个包括工程师、生物学家和临床医生在内的多学科团队中工作，研究开发和实施利用EV作为癌症标志物的新型传感器，用于新的实时诊断和癌症分类。

EPSRC Portfolio Research Areas: The project aligns with RF and microwave devices (Grow), Sensors and Instrumentation (Maintain), Microsystems (Maintain), and Clinical Technologies (Maintain). Description:A cancer becomes life-threatening when the primary tumour spreads from the place where it first started to another place in the body. The spreading process is called metastasis, a tumour formed by spreading cancer cells is called a metastatic tumour. Metastasis is the principal cause of death in patients diagnosed with invasive cancer. At present, there is no curative treatment available for patients with metastatic cancer. This clearly demonstrates the urgent need for increased knowledge about the cellular communication mechanisms between tumour cells and normal cells resulting in pathological metabolism in the metastatic site. Extracellular vesicles (EVs) are a distinct population of membranous vesicles of endocytic origin. They range from 30 to 150 nm in diameter and are released by cells upon fusion of intracellular multivesicular bodies with the plasma membrane. Acoustic waves have been applied in highly sensitive separation of bio-particles such as cells. By increasing the frequency of the acoustic waves, they are capable of separating cancer-derived EVs subpopulation from whole blood. The proposed project, built on the supervisors' available techniques, will fabricate a high frequency acoustic transducer integrating acoustic and microfluidic techniques to identify and separate cancer-derived EV subpopulation from other EVs. The method will be evaluated against conventional EV separation by ultracentrifugation to investigate its sensitivity and specificity. Cancer patient blood will be sourced to test the transducer in a preliminary clinical study. The transducer will be an integrative and sensitive alternative diagnostic technique that targets system-level circulating tumour biomarkers to allow the investigation of the fundamental roles of EVs in cancer progression and treatment response. The candidate will work in a multidisciplinary team including engineers, biologists and clinicians to investigate developing and implementing the novel transducer for new real-time diagnosis and classification of cancer by using EV as a cancer marker.