Next-Generation Precision Medicine Solutions – Diagnostics

As personalized medicine approaches aim to tailor treatments to individuals, improvements are needed in the detection of existing biomarkers and genomic, epigenomic, and proteomic changes that occur during disease development. This would have potential impact on medication selection and targeted therapy, reduce adverse effects, improve cost effectiveness, and shift the goal of medicine from reactive to preventative clinical decision making1. Liquid biopsies for cancer, in particular, have recently provided the advantage of early and easy screening but their use in replacing traditional methods of diagnosis needs to be validated before widespread adoption. The development of microfluidic approaches has greatly improved the sensitivity and specificity of single cell detection for many disease diagnoses. However, standardization and quality assurance need to be implemented to assure that assay performance is reproducible and robust. Within this proposal we are partnering with Cellular Analytics, a Toronto-based start-up company with a proprietary microfluidic platform (CytoFindTM) that detects protein expression on single cells. This technology will be used to develop and validate CytoFind as a diagnostic for two types of cancer and malignant pleural mesothelioma with the aim of improving clinical decision making and patient outcomes.

Faculty Supervisor:

Shana Kelley;Stephane Angers

Student:

Bushra Tasadduq

Partner:

Cellular Analytics

Discipline:

Pharmacy / Pharmacology

Sector:

Professional, scientific and technical services

University:

University of Toronto