Early
Cancer Detection
Cancer is one of the leading causes of death worldwide with 10 million
deaths in 2020. In the past years, the global oncology spending has been
constantly increasing reaching a total of 167 billion U.S. dollars in 2020.
For a successful treatment of the disease, early detection is crucial
and results in a low mortality rate. Effective for early detection, screening
campaigns are pivotal both for monitoring the health of the population and for
reducing the burden on the national health system. However, affordable and
accessible screening programs with non-invasive techniques are still not
available. Moreover, existing cancer diagnostic tests often do not detect cancer
at its early stages (0-I).
Nematodes behavioral responses to biofluids from cancer patients have
been investigated for many years. Independent labs are currently working on the
development of cancer screening tests exploiting the remarkable ability of C. Elegans nematodes to sense cancer smell, which are highly attracted by
biofluids from people with cancer while they are repelled by those of healthy
people. C. elegans can detect cancer smell also at very early stages
with an accuracy higher than that of standard biomarkers.
D-Tails recently found evidence that behavioral and neuronal responses
of nematodes are strictly related to the specific content of volatile organic
compounds (VOCs) in biofluids of breast and prostate cancer patients. Nanomolar
sensitivity of the olfactory system in C. Elegans enables it to detect
subtle alterations of specific VOCs caused by the disease, not detectable with
existing standard techniques. Our team exploited this ability to perform
screening tests on people with breast cancer reaching an accuracy above 97%,
which outperforms currently available biomarkers.
Via bioengineering, we also uncovered the molecular pathways mediating
cancer discriminating behavior in nematodes. Cancer types detected by nematodes
are of several types (including lung, prostate, pancreatic, breast, and colon),
each with its own VOCs selection causing the stimulation of distinctive
molecular patterns in the nematode olfactory system.
Our next challenge is to transfer this knowledge into an affordable and
easy-to-use test-kit compatible with high-throughput screening formats. We are
currently focusing on two of the most incident cancer types and on the most
lethal and less treatable one: breast, prostate and pancreatic, respectively.
In the past years, D-Tails filed two patents related to the new technologies
and methodologies developed to pursue our aim.