Precision medicine technologies enabling a physician to prescribe the most effective personalized treatment available to each patient with cancer are evolving rapidly and could spare patients from ineffective treatments and their side effects. This work proposes to build and test a unique sensor that can help address this important need and provide actionable information to the doctor. The proposed novel nanosensor technology aims to enable monitoring if and how effectively the body's T-cells can recognize small pieces of cancer-derived specific proteins that are presented by specialized surface complexes on cancer cells in a patient's tumor. Recognition of these small protein pieces can tri...

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Precision medicine technologies enabling a physician to prescribe the most effective personalized treatment available to each patient with cancer are evolving rapidly and could spare patients from ineffective treatments and their side effects. This work proposes to build and test a unique sensor that can help address this important need and provide actionable information to the doctor. The proposed novel nanosensor technology aims to enable monitoring if and how effectively the body's T-cells can recognize small pieces of cancer-derived specific proteins that are presented by specialized surface complexes on cancer cells in a patient's tumor. Recognition of these small protein pieces can trigger the host's immune system against the cancer and mediate specific cancer cell killing. The core of this sensor technology is that it uses highly focused light to dynamically 'arrest' individual tumor cell surface complexes targeted by T-cell receptors and sense if the T-cell receptor has hit a target tumor protein. This nanosensor enables simultaneous quantification of protein size (optical signal) and effective charge (electrical signal) as independent measurements to verify whether the receptor is bound to its targeting T-cell receptor. A great advantage of the proposed technology is that it enables testing the targeting of cancer specific-derived protein pieces at concentrations that are over one thousand-fold lower than those used in current screening assays and therefore needs many fewer tumor cells and T-Cells. Needing fewer cells would enable testing for more cancer targets that could be recognized by the patient's own T-cells. Successful implementation of our research goals will motivate future scale-up studies on tumor biopsy samples to drive the development of personalized therapies based on identification of cancer-specific derived proteins in each patient's tumor.

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