NANOMIC

Disseminated (DTC) and circulating tumour cells (CTC) are the link between primary tumour and metastases in all solid cancers shown to be present in up to 30% of cancer patients without any clinical or histomorphologic signs of metastasis. Conclusive data on the prognostic relevance of DTC from a large pooled analysis of breast cancer patients provide an appealing opportunity for improved risk stratification and individualized treatment. Development of reliable diagnostics based on detection of overall rare DTC/CTC is still largely hampered by technical limitations of immunocytochemical methods, i.e. low recovery of tumour cells enrichment and observer-dependent interpretation of immunostaining with histogenetic markers in the absence of tumour cell-specific markers. This opportunity is now available with research proposal based on collaboration of 3 teams specializing in nanotechnology, biochips engineering, clinical oncology and production of proprietary highly stable single domain antibodies. With the development of multiplexed diagnostics, the premise exists for analysis of differences of antigen expression patterns of DCT, CTC and primary tumour in parallel providing the individual molecular signatures of DCT and CTC. The overall objective of this project is to create a fluorescent nanoparticle-based diagnostics permitting multi-parametric detection of tumour cells in liquid and solid tissue specimens from breast cancer patients randomized in adjuvant clinical trials.