I-Corps: High Throughput Single Cell Assay Platforms

该项目旨在商业化用于癌症药物筛选和癌症转移建模的高通量单细胞检测芯片。癌症是许多发达国家的主要死亡原因之一，癌症转移占癌症死亡的90%。研究转移的传统方法受到低通量或与体内微环境相关性差的限制。存在开发能够模拟转移级联的关键步骤的体外装置的未满足的需求。除了体外癌症转移建模之外，所提出的工作旨在提供监测和分析癌细胞异质性的解决方案。癌症耐药性是癌症治疗中最大的挑战之一。传统的药物开发方法往往侧重于平均药效，不能靶向整个肿瘤中的耐药肿瘤细胞，这可能导致肿瘤复发。本申请中提出的原型平台提供了单细胞分辨率的高通量测定能力，这可以改变癌症研究和癌症治疗的范式。所提出的平台还能够进行高通量筛选和体外转移模拟，从而显著降低药物开发成本。所提出的平台技术可以促进新的治疗思路的发展，以更低的分析成本和高通量。所提出的设备具有很高的商业潜力，满足需要，实现高通量低成本的癌症药物开发和筛选在研究界以及制药公司的测定。

This project aims to commercialize high-throughput single cell assay chips for cancer drug screening and modeling of cancer metastasis. Cancer is one of leading causes of death in many developed countries, and cancer metastasis accounts for 90% of the death caused by cancer. Conventional methods for studying metastasis are limited by low throughput or poor relevance to in-vivo microenvironment. There is an unmet need to develop in-vitro devices which can emulate critical steps of the metastatic cascade. In addition to the in-vitro cancer metastasis modeling, the proposed work aims to provide the solution to monitor and analyze cancer cell heterogeneity. Cancer drug resistance is one of the greatest challenges in cancer treatments. The conventional drug development methods used to focus on average drug efficacy and cannot target the drug resistant tumor cells in the whole tumor, which may lead to the relapse of tumor. The presented prototype platforms in this application provide the capability of high-throughput assays at single cell resolution, which can shift the paradigm of cancer research and cancer treatment. The proposed platforms also enable high-throughput screening and in-vitro metastasis emulation, resulting in significant reduction in drug development cost. The proposed platform technology can facilitate the development of novel therapeutic ideas with lower assay cost at high throughput. The proposed devices have a high commercial potential by meeting the need to realize high-throughput low-cost assays for cancer drug development and screening in research communities as well as pharmaceutical companies.