Researchers at Herriot-Watt University’s project, The MicroSNARE project, has been awarded £750,000 to aide their research in preventing the need for biopsies, a painful and expensive operation to identify the best treatment for cancer patients.

The project could make identifying and characterising cancer cells “less invasive and, crucially, allow for much earlier identification and intervention” according to Dr Kedar Pandya, the Director for Cross-Council Programmes at Engineering and the Physical Sciences Research Council, which awarded the grant.

The grant money will be used to develop robotic benchtop and microfluidic platforms, similar to some lateral flow tests, in order to more easily identify circulating tumour DNA, known as ctDNA. These will be used by a group of scientists, who will examine a set of blood samples from breast cancer patients and assess the best performing methods to treat their cancer, which will hopefully deliver more sensitive detection of ctDNA and require less expensive DNA sequencing.

Led by Professor Maïwenn Kersaudy-Kerhoas, the overall co-lead for the university’s new Global Research Institute in Health and Care Technologies, and Professor Nicholas Leslie, an academic lead for fighting cancer in the institute, MicroSNARE aims to achieve this by finding an alternative to biopsies.

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An uncomfortable surgery, biopsies involve the surgical removal of a part of a patients tumour in order to examine it and through this, help select the best and most effective treatment options to treat the individual patient’s cancer. The alternative to this involves examining blood samples from cancer patients, and examining DNA circulating the patients blood, that isn’t held within the body’s blood cells.

In addition to this DNA, when a cancer patient has a tumour, they have DNA circulating in their blood that has comes from their tumour. This is because some of their DNA has been mutated by the tumour and changed from a healthy cell, to a cancer cell, called ctDNA.

Methods to study ctDNA instead of examining the tumour itself have been developed, but due to a high presence of healthy DNA circulating the patient’s blood and ctDNA being scarce, it is currently very difficult for researchers to examine.

As Professor Nicolas Leslie explains: “In late-stage cancer patients, there's quite a lot of DNA in the bloodstream that would be from a tumour, but often it's too late to cure those patients. In early-stage cancer patients, the chances of successful treatment are higher, but something like 99% or more of the free circulating DNA in a blood sample will have come from healthy cells in the body, making identifying mutant DNA more difficult.”

The team at Herriot-Watt have developed a new method to process blood samples that could make the detection and characterisation of cancer cells easier.

Professor Leslie continued: “What we want to do is further develop a technique we’ve tested in the lab which we plan will allow us to diagnose, analyse and characterise tumours much earlier, as well as detecting the recurrence of cancer before it’s had a chance to develop and spread.”

The scientists will work in collaboration with Dr Olga Oikonomidou, who is both the University of Edinburgh’s Academic Consultant Medical Oncologist, and the Breast Cancer Translational Research Lead at the Institute of Genetics and Cancer. Professor Leslie commented: “Dr Oikonomidou is going to provide us not only with the relevant patient blood samples so we can test efficacy and validate our technique but also help us to understand the clinical relevance and correlate our data with long term outcomes like disease free intervals and overall survival.”

Dr Oikinomidou commented on the research: “Monitoring early breast cancer patients with liquid biopsies (cell free DNA or cfDNA) has been unsuccessful so far due to technical and biological detection challenges. cfDNA provides a more comprehensive genomic landscape of the entire disease and is superior for detecting certain acquired genomic alterations as tissue biopsies are subject to sampling bias. Moreover, cfDNA offers faster turnaround time and greater feasibility compared to tissue biopsies.”

She continued: “We hope that with this new technique being developed by Professor Leslie and his team we will have the chance to overcome all the existing challenges and offer patients a successful and clinically meaningful follow up of their disease.”

Vice Principle and Provost at Herriot-Watt University commented on the project: “The mission of our new Global Research Institute in Health and Care Technologies is to collaborate closely with industry and sector partners to deliver innovative, sustainable, and practical solutions to global health challenges. MicroSNARE is another example of this approach.”

“Fighting cancer is one of the five key themes for Health and Care Technologies and the collaboration with a scientist of Dr Olga Oikonomidou’s reputation will allow our researchers to accelerate their work.”