Personalized Protease fingerprinting for early cancer diagnosis
UCSD researchers have developed a personalized protease fingerprinting assay which can be useful for improved imaging during surgery and post-surgical assessment of the tumor tissue. The ex vivo assay is based on cleavage of dual fluorescently labeled substrates; the tumor extract’s enzymes cleaves the fluorescent probe, resulting in a personalized profile of the proteases active in that specific tumor. As a proof of concept, the inventors have synthesized the first generation of MMP cleavable probes which have been tested on various (frozen) human tumor samples (breast, head and neck tumors). The resulting protease expression profiles, should make it possible to select the specific probe(s) which can be used for intra-operative imaging and tumor boundary determination. Synthesis of probes for other cancer associated MMPs and non-MMP proteases is underway. The investigators hope to conduct a clinical trial to exploring the correlation of protease activity with several clinically relevant parameters.Sample Data(change in fluoresence/min)Key: 4T1 and 8119 represent mouse breast cancer graftsSCCA2, SCCA5 and SCCA7 represent human head and neck squamous cell carcinomas
Biomedical
DNA/Gene Engineering
8685372
Intellectual Property Info A provisional patent application has been authorized. Additional Technologies by these Inventors Tech ID/UC Case 23644/2013-105-0 Related Cases 2013-105-0, 2013-185-0, 2009-220-0
USA
