Manish Kohli, Director and Physician Scientist Training Program University of Utah Health, shared a post on LinkedIn:
“Overexpression of microRNA-375 (miR-375) in metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC) is linked to poor survival and resistance to docetaxel chemotherapy by suppressing target genes, including SEC23A and YAP1 signaling pathways.
Traditional plasma-based quantification of miR-375 as a predictive and prognostic biomarker using conventional RT-PCR is time-consuming, technically demanding, and challenging to implement in routine clinical workflows for individual patients.
To overcome this limitation, we report in ACSNano an ultra-sensitive sequence-specific microRNA counting platform for biologically relevant miRs in mCRPC using DNA nano flowers (DNFs) densely encoded with fluorescent quantumdots (QDs).
The QD-DNFs exhibit high specificity to complementary target miRs and allow for highly sensitive single-event detection in solution via fluorescence microscopy or flow cytometry. This single-molecule counting platform shows strong concordance with conventional RT-PCR assays while achieving significantly greater analytical sensitivity.
This innovative approach has potential future applications in advancing precision medicine for mCRPC as a rapid point-of-care molecular diagnostic tool for monitoring treatment response, minimal residual disease (MRD), and therapeutic effectiveness in patients undergoing systemic therapies.
I am extremely grateful to NIH for funding this RO1 project for developing a novel liquid biopsy approach in precision medicine converging clinical and bio-engineering sciences in liquid biopsies and to the collaborative team and expertise of Andrew M. Smith and Chia-Wei Kuo at UIUC.”
Title: Quantum Dot Encoding for In-Solution Single-Molecule Biomarker Counting in Metastatic Prostate Cancer
Authors: Chia-Wei Kuo, Siva Nalla, Suresh Sarkar, Wonseok Lee, Liang Wang, Manish Kohli, Andrew M Smith
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