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

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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.