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

EPSRC投资组合研究领域：该项目与RF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）保持一致。描述：当原发性肿瘤从最初开始的地方扩散到体内的另一个地方时，癌症就会危及生命。扩散过程称为转移，由扩散癌细胞形成的肿瘤称为转移性肿瘤。转移是诊断为浸润性癌症的患者死亡的主要原因。目前，对于患有转移性癌症的患者没有治愈性治疗。这清楚地表明迫切需要增加有关肿瘤细胞和正常细胞之间的细胞通讯机制的知识，从而导致转移部位的病理代谢。细胞外囊泡（EV）是内吞来源的膜囊泡的独特群体。它们的直径范围为30至150 nm，并在细胞内多泡体与质膜融合时由细胞释放。声波已经应用于诸如细胞的生物颗粒的高灵敏度分离。通过增加声波的频率，它们能够从全血中分离癌症衍生的EV亚群。拟议的项目建立在监督员可用的技术基础上，将制造一个高频声换能器，集成声学和微流体技术，以识别和分离癌症衍生的EV亚群与其他EV。将通过超离心法对该方法与传统EV分离进行评价，以研究其灵敏度和特异性。在初步临床研究中，将采集癌症患者血液以测试换能器。该传感器将是一种综合和敏感的替代诊断技术，其目标是系统水平的循环肿瘤生物标志物，以允许研究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，研究开发和实施新型传感器，通过使用EV作为癌症标志物来进行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.