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Screening for drug resistance is key to improving treatment approaches for many cancers. Researchers in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Toronto have developed a new technology for liquid biopsy to identify which patients may not respond to standard therapy. Screening patients using blood sample as opposed to more invasive techniques required for conventional biopsies is a good development.
Using magnetic nanoparticles with DNA to capture probes on the surface that can target circulating tumour cells (CTCs) in blood samples to see if the cells contains biomarkers associated with drug resistance can detect the individual magnetized cells in a microfluidic device built in the laboratory, isolating them from all the other cells in the sample and allows researchers to perform sensitive analysis.
The cells with the highest magnetic content will also have high mRNA expression for the biomarker associated with drug resistance. Patients with high mRNA expression should be considered for other therapies because they won’t respond to the first-line treatment.
Targeting the cells responsible for spreading cancer CTCs is important because they carry information from the primary tumour that can inform treatment; however, they are outnumbered by a billion-to-one by normal cells in a patient’ blood and are diffficult to capture. The new method can provide both CTC count and an analysis of the clinically relevant biomarker.
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