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Grant Information

Grant ID	RP260367
Awarded On	May 20, 2026
Title	Purification- and Isolation-free eXosomE profiLing (PIXEL) for lung cancer detection
Program	Academic Research
Award Mechanism	Individual Investigator
Institution/Organization	University of Houston
Principal Investigator/Program Director	Wei-chuan Shih
Cancer Sites	Lung and Bronchus
Contracted Amount	$899,999* *Pending contract negotiation
Lay Summary	Detection of cancer biomarkers in the blood, known as "liquid biopsy", can in principle improve the accuracy of detecting cancer at its earliest stage. Exosomes are cell-excreted extracellular vesicles that contain surface proteins and genetic materials (DNA and RNA) that reflect the characteristics and make-up of the parental cell. Analyzing exosomes would therefore provide direct insight into the state of the cancerous cell. However, current technologies for detecting circulating tumor exosomes (CTE) face a multitude of challenges such as lack of standardized isolation and purification protocols, insufficient detection sensitivity and resolution to perform single exosome profiling, relyin... Read More Detection of cancer biomarkers in the blood, known as "liquid biopsy", can in principle improve the accuracy of detecting cancer at its earliest stage. Exosomes are cell-excreted extracellular vesicles that contain surface proteins and genetic materials (DNA and RNA) that reflect the characteristics and make-up of the parental cell. Analyzing exosomes would therefore provide direct insight into the state of the cancerous cell. However, current technologies for detecting circulating tumor exosomes (CTE) face a multitude of challenges such as lack of standardized isolation and purification protocols, insufficient detection sensitivity and resolution to perform single exosome profiling, relying on bulk sampling using significant blood volume, and etc. As a result, current CTE analysis can only generate an overly simplistic binary outcome and lacks sufficient dynamic range. Our proposal builds a device and automated instrument that pushes the envelope of CTE assay by eliminating isolation and purification, and directly count and profile exosomes from 20 microliter of blood plasma. We will carry out additional optimization and automation in this project and further develop a high-throughput testing platform for scale-up operations. We will also team up with MD Anderson Cancer Center's Suspicion of Cancer Clinic to establish reliability, repeatability and diagnostic accuracy using patients seen at the clinic. Read Less