Nanotech for cancer diagnosis & cancer therapy (BIOE97173)
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Nanotechnologies for cancer diagnosis & cancer therapy Lecture Notes (BIOE97173)
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Course
Nanotech for cancer diagnosis & cancer therapy (BIOE97173)
Institution
Imperial College London (ICL)
Complete Lecture Notes for the 2021/2022 Nanotechnology for cancer diagnosis and cancer therapy course taught at Imperial College London by the Department of Bioengineering.
Nanotech for cancer diagnosis & cancer therapy (BIOE97173)
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Nanotechnologies for Cancer Diagnosis and Cancer Therapy Notes
Lecture 1: Introduction and overview of cancer
What is Cancer?
• Group of diseases in which abnormal cells divide without control and can invade
nearby tissues. Also called malignancy (or malignant tumour) and neoplasm.
• When cancer forms and develops, cells start behaving in an abnormal way, surviving,
and duplicating despite growing old, damaged, and dysfunctional, ultimately forming
tumours.
• Cancer can form anywhere in the body if conditions are suitable (takes the name of
where it started) & can spread anywhere (hence malignancy).
Challenges to cancer:
• Diagnosis
o Varied symptoms - so difficult to detect.
o Persistent symptoms often associated to late diagnosis
o Initial diagnosis followed by prognosis
o Widespread public screening (rare)
o Sensitivity of equipment (False Positive, False Negative)
The earlier you diagnose the
cancer, the better the survival
rare
• Treatment
o Depends on cancer type and grading
o Immunotherapy (help immune system) or hormone therapy (hormone
dependant cancers)
o Tumour removal via (Robotic) Surgery
o Radiation therapy to shrink tumour
o Chemotherapy (chemical drugs and side effects)
• One model fits all no longer valid – Precision Medicine (adapted to patient) is a
better solution
,Biopsies:
• Tissue biopsy
o Pros:
-Highly Specific (98-99% Accuracy)
o Cons:
-Very invasive: typically have to cut the patient up or stick needles in
-Localised sampling: bad in the sense that you don’t know what’s happening
besides the specific area you’ve sampled & extracted (can be overcome by
taking multiple samples around the area)
-Timely & Costly
• Liquid biopsy (Blood/Urine/Saliva)
o Pros:
-Minimally invasive
-Comprehensive tissue profile: so, you’re not limited to a bit of tissue or cells from a
localised area but have access to a broader range of biomarkers from different areas
of your body
-Quick
o Cons:
-Highly diluted biomarkers: The blood samples you take is typically heavily diluted of
the biomarker you are looking for, so you need highly sensitive tech to detect them
-Heavy sample processing: quite labour intensive to extract the biomarker you want
and to separate what you don’t want
• Liquid biopsy (Skin interstitial fluid)
o Pros:
-Pain-free sampling: don’t have to go into the vein/capillary or even prick the finger
(you don’t reach the nerve cells)
-Less “junk” than blood
-High spatial resolution: skin interstitial fluid spreads much slowly than blood, so if
you sample the interstitial fluid near the tumour itself, you can pick up a much
higher concentration of tumour derived biomarkers than what you’d get in blood.
,Biomarkers:
• Biomarker: A biological characteristic that is objectively measured and evaluated as
an indicator of normal biological processes, pathogenic processes or
pharmacological response to a therapeutic intervention (Can be tumour derived or
from non-tumour tissues in response to the tumour)
Basically, an indication of change (Concentration of molecule, Behaviour of a protein
(change in a gene))
• Biomarkers can be:
o Diagnostic: Helps determine the presence and type of cancer
o Prognostic: Giving an indication of the patient’s current cancer condition and
outcome with or without treatment
o Predictive: Help identify which treatment the patient will respond to or
benefit from
o Non-invasive: (No harm- breath, saliva, urine)
o Minimally Invasive: (blood, skin interstitial fluid)
o Invasive: Tissue (Biopsy)
• Some Examples of Biomarker Sampling:
Breath Analysis
, We want to make sure our biomarker
tests are highly sensitive and specific
Lecture 2: Sample Processing Methods of bodily fluids
Why process blood and not directly use it for cancer detection? :
• Blood contains a lot of things that interfere with detection method so it’s hard to
detect biomarkers with a high sensitivity and specificity – because of that you have
to pre-process blood to remove some elements to facilitate and simplify detection.
1st step of blood processing is centrifugation (splitting the blood up into 3 different
layers(based on weight and size of molecules) for easier analysis later on):
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