Abstract

Modern medicine is currently transitioning to a new paradigm of precision and personalized care, where patients will be comprehensively screened and monitored for the detailed molecular abnormalities that characterise their specific disease. In the past decade, nanotechnology has provided new tools (e.g., next-generation sequencing) with unprecedented power to comprehensively interrogate genetic, transcriptomic and epigenetic information. The Centre for Personalised Nanomedicine at UQ is focused on translating these new technologies into a clinical setting, whilst simultaneously developing the next generation of point-of-care diagnostic technologies to further empower the personalised and precision medicine approach. As part of a major National Collaborative grant funded by the National Breast Cancer Foundation (“Enabling clinical epigenetic diagnostics: The next generation of personalized breast cancer care”, CG-12-07), our consortium recently published hundreds of epigenetic regions that area highly informative in cancer1-2. These are now being validated in a real-time clinical setting, where comprehensive DNA , methyl-DNA and RNA information is collected in tandem and analysed. In this paper we will present data on the clinical translation of this approach, highlighting some of the positive impacts that such an approach can make on the “recovery trajectory” of cancer patients. Along with comprehensive DNA /RNA/methylated-DNA sequencing methodologies, several point-of-care nanotechnologies recently developed by our lab will be presented3-12. These include novel technologies for detecting circulating free DNA /RNA/methyl-DNA, circulated tumour cells, exosomes and protein biomarkers. Several of these technologies have been developed collaboratively with US partners via a collaborative NIH grant (“Accelerated Molecular Probe Pipeline”, U01AI082186 -01).

Refs: 1) Stone, et al., Nature Communications (2015) 2) Stirzaker, et al., Nature Communications (2015) 3) Wee, Trau, Nature Chemistry (2014) 4) Wang, Wee, Trau, Chem Comm. (2015) 5) Wang, Vaidyanathan, Shiddiky; Trau, ACS Nano (2015). 6) Vaidyanathan, van Leeuwen, Rauf, Shiddiky, Trau, Sci Reports (2015) 7) Grewal, Shiddiky, Spadafora, Cangelosi, Trau, J. Phys. Chem. C (2015) 8) Wee, Sakandar, Shiddiky, Dobrovic, Trau Clinical Chem. (2015) 9) Korbie, Lin, Wall, Nair, Stirzaker, Clark, Trau, Clinical Epigenetics (2015) 10) Wee, Lau, Botella, Trau, Chem Comm (2015) 11) Lane, Korbie, Anderson, Vaidyanathan, Trau, Sci Reports (2015) 12) Anderson, Lane, Korbie, Trau, Langmuir (2015)