Grant: Emerging Team Grant: Regenerative Medicine and Nanomedicine - LOI

Prostate cancer is the most common form of cancer in North American men. In some cases, the disease can produce slow-growing tumours that offer little threat to the overall health of the affected individual. However, in others, aggressive tumours metastatize to other sites and cause incurable and fatal disease. Diagnosis the disease early, before metastasis occurs is critical for improved patient outcome in these cases. Moreover, it is essential that aggressive forms of prostate cancer are distinguished from non-aggressive forms so that treatment decisions are made appropriately. Screening tests for prostate cancer are used routinely to detect this disease. The non-invasive test that is available, however, is not specific and cannot distinguish cancers with different levels of aggressiveness. Invasive biopsies offer more clarity on the state of a tumour, but are expensive and inappropriate as a screening tool. Clearly, new non-invasive testing strategies are urgently needed to decrease the mortality rate from this disease. There is growing evidence that low levels of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) can be found in the bloodstream of patients harboring aggressive disease. In order to detect and evaluate these cells, however, diagnostic platforms must be made available with the very high levels of sensitivity required to analyze the molecular markers within CTCs that can reveal them as markers of disease. Recently, The Kelley and Sargent groups described the development of a new microchip-based platform that has unprecedented sensitivity for the analysis of multiplexed prostate cancer markers. The chips, functionalized with nanomaterials to produce high sensitivity, were tested against prostate tumour tissue and shown to be able to detect the presence of specific markers. The main objective of this proposal is to demonstrate that chip-based nanosensors can detect the same markers in circulating cancer cells in prostate cancer patients.