Did you know that cancer accounted for 9.6 million deaths across the world in 2018 alone?
Innovative methods are thus widely sought to support the early and proper diagnosis, and provide the tools for patient surveillance for early detection of disease progression and therapy resistance.
Innovative multiplex assays (Innoplex) are attempts at measuring the expression of multiple tumour biomarkers in low abundance samples. These enable more precise and personalised treatment because they take into account the heterogeneity of primary tumour, the progression of tumour during therapy and the metastatic surveillance of the individual patient.
In this regard, three important aspects of personalised cancer medicine, namely patient stratification, prognosis and disease monitoring, help with discovering and validating actionable biomarkers, specifically, measurable indicators of tumour type and burden and the pharmalogical response to it.
A team of UM researchers have optimised what are called RNA multiplex panels in molecular oncology, with the result that these have a wide range of possible applications in the diagnosis of tumours and surveillance of tumours during therapy.
Titled ‘Bead-based RNA multiplex panels for biomarker detecton in oncology samples, the paper was written by Dr Jeannesse Scerri during her PhD studies. She was supervised by Prof. Godfrey Grech from the Department of Pathology and Prof. Christian Scerri from the Department of Physiology & Biochemistry.
The results were jointly published with the life science giants Thermo Fisher and Luminex corporation in the International Clinical Laboratory and Omnia Health online journals.
The journal can be read in its entirety online.