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UniversityofBath OP t1_izejija wrote

>What part of your research excites you all the most?

Thank you for your question. We are currently optimising the design of the microfluidic device to efficiently isolate exosomes from an ovarian cancer cell line. So still at its very early stages. The key challenge is to capture cancer cell-derived exosomes (the biomarkers we are interested in) from the total population of exosomes (healthy cell-derived + cancer cell-derived). This is because the latter are a very small fraction of the total population and also because of their size (a few nanometres) it is harder to capture and detect them with existing technology. Overall, this is a really exciting project, and when realised, would pave way for a national level screening programme for early detection of ovarian cancer. The parts that we are most excited about are(i) identifying reliable biomarkers for early stages of ovarian cancer and (ii) being able to effectively capture and detect them within our device.

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Neverfloppy t1_izj2kbg wrote

You know there's an FDA approved method for gathering CTC's for analysis - Parsortix from ANGLE

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