Cancer metastasis defines a major challenge

Cancer metastasis defines a major challenge. 17M people were diagnosed with cancer and 9.6M succumbed to the disease in 2018 with 90% of deaths attributed to metastasis. Personalized cancer diagnostics and Information Technology – enabled prediction of disease progression form rapidly expanding markets, offering a vast commercial opportunity. Early detection of metastasis mediators in blood is crucial for prompt therapeutic action preventing or delaying tumour progression. This procedure, known as Liquid Biopsy (LB), suffers from two major drawbacks: (i) infrequent temporal sampling that can lead to critical delays, and (ii) uncertain sensitivity given that finite number of blood samples can be drawn. SELAS-VIEW introduces a sound, credible, feasible, internationally competitive and highly innovative personalized and multifunctional (bioengineering + quantitative analytics + mobile Health) Platform for minimally-invasive, long-term, high temporal-sampling, in vivo continuous monitoring of progression of metastasis in Lung Cancer (LC), the leading cause of cancer deaths globally. A pre-clinically validated platform for lung cancer metastasis to the brain, the most intractable and economically unviable case, will serve as the project’s demonstrated prototype. The platform will consist of: (i) a personalized, implantable biosensor that will detect circulating biomarkers of metastasis via appropriate receptors and converts the detected molecules into an optical signal.