More Like this

1. Chemo-specific designs for the enumeration of circulating tumor cells: advances in liquid biopsy

   https://doi.org/10.1039/d0tb02574g  

   Singh, Balram; Arora, Smriti; D’Souza, Alain; Kale, Narendra; Aland, Gourishankar; Bharde, Atul; Quadir, Mohiuddin; Calderón, Marcelo; Chaturvedi, Pankaj; Khandare, Jayant (January 2021, Journal of Materials Chemistry B)

   null (Ed.)

   Advanced materials and chemo-specific designs at the nano/micrometer-scale have ensured revolutionary progress in next-generation clinically relevant technologies. For example, isolating a rare population of cells, like circulating tumor cells (CTCs) from the blood amongst billions of other blood cells, is one of the most complex scientific challenges in cancer diagnostics. The chemical tunability for achieving this degree of exceptional specificity for extra-cellular biomarker interactions demands the utility of advanced entities and multistep reactions both in solution and in the insoluble state. Thus, this review delineates the chemo-specific substrates, chemical methods, and structure–activity relationships (SARs) of chemical platforms used for isolation and enumeration of CTCs in advancing the relevance of liquid biopsy in cancer diagnostics and disease management. We highlight the synthesis of cell-specific, tumor biomarker-based, chemo-specific substrates utilizing functionalized linkers through chemistry-based conjugation strategies. The capacity of these nano/micro substrates to enhance the cell interaction specificity and efficiency with the targeted tumor cells is detailed. Furthermore, this review accounts for the importance of CTC capture and other downstream processes involving genotypic and phenotypic CTC analysis in real-time for the detection of the early onset of metastases progression and chemotherapy treatment response, and for monitoring progression free-survival (PFS), disease-free survival (DFS), and eventually overall survival (OS) in cancer patients. 

   more » « less
2. Rapid isolation of circulating cancer associated fibroblasts by acoustic microstreaming for assessing metastatic propensity of breast cancer patients

   https://doi.org/10.1039/d0lc00969e  

   Jiang, Ruoyu; Agrawal, Sudhanshu; Aghaamoo, Mohammad; Parajuli, Ritesh; Agrawal, Anshu; Lee, Abraham P. (January 2021, Lab on a Chip)

   null (Ed.)

   We demonstrate a label free and high-throughput microbubble-based acoustic microstreaming technique to isolate rare circulating cells such as circulating cancer associated fibroblasts (cCAFs) in addition to circulating tumor cells (CTCs) and immune cells ( i.e. leukocytes) from clinically diagnosed patients with a capture efficiency of 94% while preserving cell functional integrity within 8 minutes. The microfluidic device is self-pumping and was optimized to increase flow rate and achieve near perfect capturing of rare cells enabled by having a trapping capacity above the acoustic vortex saturation concentration threshold. Our approach enables rapid isolation of CTCs, cCAFs and their associated clusters from blood samples of cancer patients at different stages. By examining the combined role of cCAFs and CTCs in early cancer onset and metastasis progression, the device accurately diagnoses both cancer and the metastatic propensity of breast cancer patients. This was confirmed by flow cytometry where we observed that metastatic breast cancer blood samples had significantly higher percentage of exhausted CD8 + T cells expressing programmed cell death protein 1 (PD1), higher number of CD4 + T regulatory cells and T helper cells. We show for the first time that our lateral cavity acoustic transducers (LCATs)-based approach can thus be developed into a metastatic propensity assay for clinical usage by elucidating cancer immunological responses and the complex relationships between CTCs and its companion tumor microenvironment. 

   more » « less
3. Saliency Maps of Images of Facial Disfigurements from Head and Neck Cancer

   Cook, M.; Bordes, M.C.; Lui, J.; Engelmann, J.; Chopra, D.; Reece, G.; Hanson, S.; Markey, M.K. (August 2019, 2019 BMES Conference Proceedings - REU Abstract Accepted Poster)

   Introduction: Head and neck cancer (HNC) and its treatment can result in facial disfigurement and functional defects in speech, swallowing, and vision that persist after reconstructive surgery. Body image concerns are pervasive among HNC patients, and a large portion of these concerns stem from worries about social interaction. Our overarching goal is to develop normative interventions to inform HNC patients about how others will respond to the changes in their facial appearance. In this study, we investigated saliency map algorithms for highlighting regions of interest on a clinically disfigured face that are expected to draw an observer’s eye based on color, intensity, etc. 

   more » « less
4. Vascular and Blood Compatibility of Engineered Cationic Cellulose Nanocrystals in Cell-Based Assays

   https://doi.org/10.3390/nano11082072  

   Bernier, Alexandre; Tobias, Tanner; Nguyen, Hoang; Kumar, Shreshth; Tuga, Beza; Imtiaz, Yusha; Smith, Christopher W.; Sunasee, Rajesh; Ckless, Karina (August 2021, Nanomaterials)

   null (Ed.)

   An emerging interest regarding nanoparticles (NPs) concerns their potential immunomodulatory and pro-inflammatory activities, as well as their impact in the circulatory system. These biological activities of NPs can be related to the intensity and type of the responses, which can raise concerns about adverse side effects and limit the biomedical applicability of these nanomaterials. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of a library of cationic cellulose nanocrystals (CNCs) in the human blood and endothelial cells using cell-based assays. First, we evaluated whether the cationic CNCs would cause hemolysis and aggregation or alteration on the morphology of red blood cells (RBC). We observed that although these nanomaterials did not alter RBC morphology or cause aggregation, at 24 h exposure, a mild hemolysis was detected mainly with unmodified CNCs. Then, we analyzed the effect of various concentrations of CNCs on the cell viability of human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVECs) in a time-dependent manner. None of the cationic CNCs caused a dose-response decrease in the cell viability of HUVEC at 24 h or 48 h of exposure. The findings of this study, together with the immunomodulatory properties of these cationic CNCs previously published, support the development of engineered cationic CNCs for biomedical applications, in particular as vaccine nanoadjuvants. 

   more » « less
5. A deep convolutional neural network trained on representative samples for circulating tumor cell detection

   https://doi.org/10.1109/WACV.2016.7477603  

   Mao, Yunxiang; Yin, Zhaozheng; Schober, Joseph (March 2016, 2016 IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV))

   The number of Circulating Tumor Cells (CTCs) in blood indicates the tumor response to chemotherapeutic agents and disease progression. In early cancer diagnosis and treatment monitoring routine, detection and enumeration of CTCs in clinical blood samples have significant applications. In this paper, we design a Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN) with automatically learned features for image-based CTC detection. We also present an effective training methodology which finds the most representative training samples to define the classification boundary between positive and negative samples. In the experiment, we compare the performance of auto-learned feature from DCNN and hand-crafted features, in which the DCNN outperforms hand-crafted feature. We also prove that the proposed training methodology is effective in improving the performance of DCNN classifiers. 

   more » « less