Steve Soper's Biography

Steve Soper, Foundation Distinguished Professor, Director, Center of BioModular Multi-Scale System for Precision Medicine, The University of Kansas

Prof. Soper is currently a Foundation Distinguished Professor in Chemistry and Mechanical Engineering at the University of Kansas, Lawrence. Prof. Soper also holds an appointment at Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology in Ulsan, South Korea, where he is a World Class University Professor. He is also serving as a Science Advisor for a number of major worldwide companies. Prof. Soper is currently on the Editorial Board for Scientific Reports and Journal of Micro- and Nanosystems.

As a result of his efforts, Prof. Soper has secured extramural funding totaling >$103M and has published over 265 peer-reviewed manuscripts (h index = 71) and is the author of 20 patents. He is also the founder of a startup company, BioFluidica, which is marketing devices for the isolation and enumeration of circulating tumor cells. His list of awards includes Chemical Instrumentation by the American Chemical Society, the Benedetti-Pichler Award for Microchemistry, Fellow of the AAAS, Fellow of Applied Spectroscopy, Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, R&D 100 Award, Distinguished Masters Award at LSU and Outstanding Scientist/Engineer in the state of Louisiana in 2001. Finally, Prof. Soper has granted 60 PhDs and 6 MS degrees to students under his mentorship. He currently heads a group of 20 researchers.

Precision Medicine Using Liquid Biopsies: A New Paradigm for Managing Cancer Diseases

Wednesday, 9 October 2019 at 09:00

Add to Calendar ▼2019-10-09 09:00:002019-10-09 10:00:00Europe/LondonPrecision Medicine Using Liquid Biopsies: A New Paradigm for Managing Cancer DiseasesSingle Cell Analysis Summit 2019 in Coronado Island, CaliforniaCoronado Island, CaliforniaSELECTBIOenquiries@selectbiosciences.com

Precision medicine seeks to match patients to appropriate therapies that optimize clinical outcome from molecular signatures of their disease. These molecular signatures can be secured from circulating markers found in blood (i.e., liquid biopsies). The marker types include circulating tumor cells (CTCs), cell-free DNA (cfDNA), and extracellular vesicles (EVs). Unfortunately, many disease-associated blood markers are a vast minority in a mixed population making them difficult to analyze due to deficiencies in current technologies used for their isolation. To address this deficiency, we are generating innovative microfluidic tools for selecting circulating markers from whole blood and determining the presence/absence of disease-specific molecular signatures secured from the liquid biopsy markers to guide therapy for a patient. The microfluidics can process whole blood (=1 mL) and search for CTCs, cfDNA, or EVs and make them available for downstream molecular processing. The microfluidics are made in plastics via injection molding, making them particularly attractive for clinical implementation, which demands low-cost disposables. In this keynote address, I will discuss our microfluidic platform for cfDNA and EV isolation. The chip consists of 1.4 million pillars that provides a high surface area for generating high loads of the target material. The chip is made from a plastic via injection molding. For the EV isolation, the pillars contain surface-immobilized antibodies directed against antigens from cancer cells that are epithelial based (EpCAM) and those with a mesenchymal phenotype (fibroblast activation protein alpha, FAPa). I will talk extensively about our EV isolation chip, and its use in several clinical examples and securing molecular information from the affinity-selected exosomes, for example mRNA expression profiling using droplet digital PCR.

Add to Calendar ▼2019-10-09 00:00:002019-10-09 00:00:00Europe/LondonSingle Cell Analysis Summit 2019Single Cell Analysis Summit 2019 in Coronado Island, CaliforniaCoronado Island, CaliforniaSELECTBIOenquiries@selectbiosciences.com

Corporate Sponsors