Project description
Organic photonics and other disruptive photonics technologies
Development of future individualized cancer diagnosis and treatment follow-up devices, through surface plasmon early detection of circulating heat shock proteins and tumor cells
Cancer has become the leading cause of death in the world and costs more in productivity and lost life than any other illness, according to the American Cancer Society report presented at the 2010 World Cancer Congress.
Started on January 2010, SPEDOC is a research initiative led by ICFO and funded by the European Comission's Seventh Framework Programme for Research.
SPEDOC aims at combining the latest advances of nano-optics, optical manipulation and microfluidics with recent discoveries in Heat shock Proteins (HSP) to develop the precursor of future individualized cancer diagnosis and treatment follow-up devices.
This innovative platform aims to be the precursor of a high sensitive point of care device to be used in biological labs by medical doctors. It should also permit providing treatment to cancer patients at an earlier stage and at lower doses with the consequent decrease of secondary effects.
Recent research studies have demonstrated that in cancer patients, HSP70 is over-expressed at the surface of cancer cells and in the peripheral blood. Being the HSP70 a universal cancer-marker, it is an interesting target to be tracked in the organism of a patient.
The higher the sensitivity of the detection of the HSP70 is, the earlier the cancer can be identified and treated. This high sensitivity is currently not available, neither in clinical nor point-of-care environments, nor at an institutional oncology research level. Indeed, today diagnosis still relies mainly on microscopic (but not molecular) cues, when the tumor is already composed of several millions of cancer cells. Alternatively, tracking cancer at the molecular level by monitoring the presence of cancer markers in the patient’s body would enable to better anticipate the development of the disease. In this context, the SPEDOC project is a multidisciplinary European initiative that joins forces of physicists and oncologists to develop a novel ultrasensitive cancer-marker sensing platform for early detection and accurate treatment monitoring.
By using the latest advances of surface plasmon nano-optics, we investigate different configurations of compact and ultra sensitive sensors able to detect HSP70 proteins both in the peripheral blood and at the surface of cells of a mice model. The developed sensors will be implemented in an advanced microfluidics chip to increase reproducibility, reduce the volume of analyte involved and enable parallel detection experiments on a single chip (lab-on-a-chip).
Cancer causes an increased expression of Heat Shock Protein HSP70 in the peripheral blood, at the surface of, and in cancer cells as a result of different sources of stress, including anti-cancer treatments. It was recently demonstrated that tumorigenicity, metastatic potential and resistance to chemotherapy correlated with an increased of expressed HSP70 in cancer cells. On the contrary, HSP70 depletion using combinatorial small peptides called peptide aptamers sensitizes cancer cells to die and could help in cancer therapy.The core goal of this project is to combine the latest advances of nano-optics, optical manipulation and microfluidics with the ultimate understanding of HSP70 to develop a novel integrated and ultra sensitive sensing platform for early cancer detection. An early detection would benefit to traditional but also new cancer therapies based on peptide aptamers which could be delivered sooner and at lower doses. The planned sensing device, based on surface plasmon resonances supported by micro and nano-structures, will operate in a microfluidic circuit to minimize the volumes of analytes and increase reproducibility. Enhanced and confined plasmonic fields will be engineered at the nanoscale to implement two main sensing schemes: (i) ultra sensitive tracking of HSP70 proteins circulating in the peripheral blood based on resonance shift induced by specific protein/receptor binding, (ii) individual cell optical trapping (exploiting latest generation of plasmonics tweezers) combined with scattering imaging and Surface Enhanced Raman Scattering to monitor the concentration of HSP70 proteins at the membrane surface and achieve systematic cancer cell screening. These transduction mechanisms and plasmonic tweezers will be integrated into a compact platform to operate in a biological laboratory environment. Such a portable device should be seen as a precursor of a future device enabling point of care diagnostics in a medical environment and leading to individualized therapy.
Fields of science
Call for proposal
FP7-ICT-2009-4
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Funding Scheme
CP - Collaborative project (generic)Coordinator Contact
Coordinator
08860 Castelldefels
Spain