iCase: Precision Medicine for early detection and intraoperative surgery of brain cancer

MRC’s iCASE awards provide students with experience of collaborative research with a non academic partner, enabling the student to spend a period of time with the non-academic partner (usually no less than three months over the lifetime of the PhD).

Students who are successfully awarded an iCASE studentship are entitled to an additional £2,500 per year as a supplement to their stipend and an annual cash contribution of at least £1,400 towards the cost of the project.  The iCase project additional funding is only secured once contracts between the industrial partner and University of Edinburgh are signed. 

Background 

Glioblastomas are one of the most common and aggressive brain cancers. Current treatments provide a mean survival of 14 months, with most tumours recurring post-resection. Optical agents to aid resection are penetrating routine clinical use but improvements are needed in both sensitivity and specificity to better identify and remove malignant cells. 

Our strategy is to harness the proteomic signatures of tumour cells to develop a molecularly-targeted approach for safer and more precise intraoperative resection of brain tumours. The ability to accomplish this has been hindered by the lack of molecular tools that retain the properties of natural peptides. We have now invented a new class of non-invasive optical agents that can be conjugated to peptides and proteins to enabling effective optical imaging and light-induced resection. 

We aim to perform a peptidomic study of patient-derived glioblastoma cell lines that will allow us to identify peptides that are highly taken up and create optical agents that will be tested fresh tumour tissue samples from surgical resections. We will finally prepare for translation of the lead compounds together with Tocris enabling us to move this technology into early phase clinical trials to provide patient benefit as quickly as possible.

Our main aim is to combine proteomics, chemistry and imaging to develop a panel of biomarkers to characterise peptidomic signatures of glioblastoma and translate them into a decision-making tool for high precision brain cancer surgery

Training outcomes

Generic and transferable skills provided by the supervisory team:

* Development of an in vitro proteomic platform for the selection and optimisation of agents.

* Data analysis and management, mining skills and bioinformatics.

* Design and characterisation of light-activatable peptides.

* Cell culture, microscopy, flow cytometry, functional assays and immunohistochemistry.

* Assessment of optimal agents in ex vivo human tissues.

* Image analysis (qualitative and quantitative).

* Research ethics and health and safety skills.

* Target Product Profile based on current standard of care, health economics data and technical feasibility (with Medical Innovations Team and Tocris).

* Participation in the development of marketing strategy through competitive landscape and future emerging technologies (with EI and Tocris).

* Study IP landscape and freedom to operate. Secure emerging IP, including paper and patent writing.

* Communication skills.

* Training in GMP-compliant facilities.