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Optical Thin Film Diagnostic Using Designer Antibodies
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- Author(s) / Creator(s)
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NFRF Exploration awarded in 2020: Personalized therapy for patients with cancer remains one of the most important challenges facing clinicians and researchers. In this proposal we describe a point-of-care device that can diagnose disease, or provide prognostic information, by quantifying protein expression. We have patented a thin film platform that uses interference colours to quantify proteins, using designer antibodies, in patient tumours, blood or urine. Interference colours are generated when light enters a two component system where the upper component is semi-transparent, that is it reflects some light, and the bottom component is also reflective. Our diagnostic platform is applicable to all patients in which tissue biopsy is possible or required. Since the vast majority of all cancers require tissue diagnosis and/or surgical resection as part of treatment, this diagnostic platform could apply to virtually all of the 180,000 Canadians affected every year with a new diagnosis of malignancy. This platform may change the nature of cancer tissue diagnosis and pathology given that we can rapidly detect and quantify markers of disease progression or metastases at the time of surgery. Our first application will be a protein biomarker platelet derived growth factor receptor alpha (PDGFRA) that is strongly associated with metastatic disease in papillary thyroid cancer. Validated in paraffin, frozen and fresh tumours and clearly linked in vitro and in vivo to an aggressive disease phenotype, PDGFRA was patented as a molecular diagnostic and represents an excellent model for testing our platform. This biomarker will be tested using the thin film diagnostic platform and tissue isolation protocol developed by Drs. Burrell and McMullen. The combination of a clinically-proven disease marker with the novel thin-film technology will provide a point-of-care diagnostic device that will predict the risk of metastases in a timely and reproducible manner. The ability to identify patients at high risk of metastases would decrease the number of unnecessary lymph node dissections in thyroid cancer by up to 40% (nearly 1300 cases/year). Physicians would also be able to focus aggressive surgery and radioactive iodine treatment efforts on those patients with aggressive disease early on decreasing recurrence rates up to 25% and possibly improving overall survival by 5 to 10% based on the known relationship between recurrence rates and prognosis.
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- Date created
- 2019-12-10
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- Type of Item
- Research Material
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- License
- ©️McMullen, Todd. All rights reserved other than by permission. This document embargoed to those without UAlberta CCID until 2030.