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SIMICA Lectures

Emma Yates, co-founder & CSO of Proteotype, UK, 30-03-2023, Egas Moniz Building

Title of the presentation: Amino Acid Concentration Signatures: a novel platform for detecting multiple types of cancer from a blood test.

Biosketch of the Speaker: Dr Emma Yates comes from an academic background at Princeton and Cambridge. Emma is Co-Founder & Chief Scientific Officer of Proteotype Diagnostic Company.

Background of the work: Within the field of oncobiology, the concept of a “liquid biopsy” has recently emerged. Liquid biopsies aim to detect the presence or prognosis of tumours without collecting a biopsy of tumour tissue. Instead, the liquid blood plasma in contact with all cells is measured. Liquid biopsies have become synonymous with genetic tests that use next generation sequencing to identify fragments of DNA leaked into the blood stream by tumours. Unfortunately, tumours often leak very little – if any – of this DNA into the blood stream. Detection therefore remains highly challenging.

Instead, we focus on proteins rather than DNA because they are naturally present within circulation at high concentration. However, unlike classical proteomics, we do not search for a panel of proteins that may indicate disease. We instead measure their common, amino acid building blocks. This allows the combined signal we measure to contain contributions from all ~3000 proteins in blood plasma, including all known and unknown targets. In this way, we measure a signal 100 trillion times stronger than DNA based approaches.

We have shown that our novel Amino Acid Concentration Signature approach can accurately predict the presence of breast, colorectal, pancreatic, and prostate cancer from a simple blood test. We have also shown that with the same Amino Acid Concentration Signature measurements we can accurately predict response to Cyclin Dependent Kinase 4/6 inhibitors in advanced breast cancer patients.

Practically, the Amino Acid Concentration Signature approach has many advantages. It is a rapid test which involves simply adding dye solutions to small volumes of patient plasma within a microplate reader assay. The colour and intensity of the resulting light indicate whether a patient has cancer or not, and can offer personalised medicine.

Raphaël Rodriguez, Institut Curie, France, 30-01-2023, Egas Moniz Building

Next Monday, Raphaël Rodriguez will present his most recent work about the prevalent role of d-block metals in the regulation of cell plasticity, entitle "Discovery of a metal-driven signaling pathway that regulates cell plasticity". Do not miss it.

Career pathways seminar, Oct 2022, Egas Moniz Building

Next Tuesday, 11th October, we will have David Shoultz, PhD MBA speaking at IMM. David is the Chief Operating Officer & Co-Founder of Monod Bio, Inc, a startup biotech company dedicated to the development of biosensors for disease diagnostics. He will give a seminar at 1pm (room 32, 3rd Floor, Egas Moniz Building), entitled "Strategies for Success in the Life Sciences”.

Madoka Hazemi, UCAM, 30-06-2022, online

Enzyme-mediated targeted RNA degradation for study of RNA modifications

Stuart Cantrill, 24-01-2022, online

Career pathways seminar

The SIMICA´s Seminars on Career Pathways invites speakers to discuss their path from Chemistry/Biology degrees to their current position, as well as to educate students about opportunities outside of academia. In this lecture Stuart Cantrill, Chief Editor of Nature Chemistry, spoke about publishing in science.