Over the course of this ERC Proof of Concept grant, the team has validated commercial interest in a multiplexed bioassay system using novel magnetic materials deployed in a liquid. The magnetic materials that have typically been at the forefront of the life sciences industry, iron oxide nanoparticles, do not have controllable magnetic properties and are challenging to biofunctionalize, and as such are generally used to isolate analytes from a liquid. By using advanced semiconductor and magnetic memory industry technology, we have created a suite of magnetic micro- and nanoparticles with characteristics that are extremely relevant to the bioassay space. Our new magnetic particles are engineered to have the following characteristics - lithographic barcoding for multiplexing, 3-dimensional orientational magnetic control for signal enhancement and sorting operations, surface chemistry tunability for biofunctionalization, and fluorescent enhancement for competitive detection limits.
The first relevant bioassay for the technology was found to be immunoassays. Multiplexed protein quantification in biosamples is a competitive space, and our technology was able to demonstrate a 5-10 pg/ml detection limit for the cytokine protein interleukin 6 which is extremely competitive. The potential for the technology to be deployed in a point-of-care device with commercially competitive detection limits led to the research team securing a translational grant for the detection of kidney cancer proteomic markers in urine in a point-of-care setting. This is a collaborative project with a urological surgeon specializing on renal cell cancer (RCC). RCC is the 7th commonest cancer in the UK, affecting 12,500 patients each year and 338,000 worldwide, with an extremely high mortality rate of 50%. Metastatic RCC is typically seen as incurable, and its early detection would drastically reduce mortality because it would allow for curative surgical interventions. The lack of a premalignant condition makes screening and early detection impossible currently, leading to largely incidental diagnosis. There is thus a pressing unmet need to develop an early diagnostic test for RCC and help shift the identification of RCC to an earlier, surgically curable stage. The team is using the magnetic nanoparticles developed during the ERC PoC grant, to attempt to detect novel biomarkers in the urine samples of RCC patients, with the goal of developing a full point-of-care device if successful.
The second relevant bioassay for the technology was found to be live cell assays, conducted in a multiplexed format. The magnetic nanoparticles were found to be ideal as microcarriers for 1-5 cells each and will potentially enable experiments with multiple cell lines to be conducted simultaneously, a technique which is not currently possible. This has the capacity to drastically increase the efficiency of identifying therapeutic molecules with the optimal drug profile during a drug screening process. Multiple cell types may be pooled together, such as cell types that are models for a disease, together with healthy cells, and even cells from multiple patients, both diseased and healthy. By treating all these cell types with various drug candidates, we aim to create a cell-based molecular fingerprint of the therapeutic and side effects of each drug candidate. This is a more disease relevant screening system for the early stages of the drug discovery process than the current industrial state of the art. The technology has the potential to develop new and better therapeutics in areas such as oncology, cardiovascular disease, obesity, and diabetes. The research team have established a spin-out company, Semarion Ltd, to exploit the commercial potential of the technology in the drug discovery space.
