Industry-first cancer screening technology secures BMC funding
Medicines Discovery Catapult (MDC) and SMi have secured a Biomedical Catalyst (BMC) grant to validate a new approach to detect cancer biomarkers. It will transform their use for routine cancer screening and enable monitoring of treatment efficacy in real-time.
Key highlights:
- Medicines Discovery Catapult (MDC) and SMi have secured a Biomedical Catalyst (BMC) grant to validate a new approach to detect cancer biomarkers.
- Under the project, MDC will use SMi's super-resolution optical platform to demonstrate a new approach that inspects liquid biopsies at single molecule resolution.
- SMi’s technology will overcome current technical challenges by rapidly and simultaneously detecting different cancer-associated biomarkers in less than one second.
Liquid biopsies are where a simple blood sample is analysed for tiny quantities of cancer-related material (cancer biomarkers). They are increasingly used for early cancer detection, improved treatment guidance (as a companion diagnostic), and to check for recurrence. However, many factors in current approaches hinder their routine use. These include the complexity of test procedures, the expertise and time needed to run tests, and the high costs. New solutions are needed to speed up the adoption of the technique to diagnose this devastating disease.
Under the BMC-funded project, MDC will use SMi's super-resolution optical platform to demonstrate a new approach that inspects liquid biopsies at single molecule resolution. This will allow researchers to detect and quantify each cancer indicator. As SMi’s optical platform can be adapted for an almost unlimited range of molecule types, it can be widely used across research and diagnosis applications. This was shown most recently in another successful MDC and SMi project to detect viral genomes, viral proteins, and the associated antibodies the patient produces in response to viral infection.
A crucial part of the current BMC-funded cancer project is screening paired samples using SMi’s optical platform and droplet digital PCR (ddPCR) testing. These technologies are available in MDC's laboratories at Alderley Park in Cheshire.
SMi’s technology will overcome current technical challenges by rapidly and simultaneously detecting different cancer-associated biomarkers, from a single patient blood sample, in less than one second. This capability will be useful at a time when the number of cancer biomarker panels is growing, but the market still relies upon complex biochemical assays and costly, time-consuming next-generation sequencing (NGS) techniques.