Single Cell Proteomics and Circulating Tumour CellsWednesday, 28 March 2012 at 14:45 Add to Calendar ▼2012-03-28 14:45:002012-03-28 15:45:00Europe/LondonSingle Cell Proteomics and Circulating Tumour CellsSingle Cell Analysis Europe in Edinburgh, ScotlandEdinburgh, ScotlandSELECTBIOenquiries@selectbiosciences.com For patients with metastatic cancer, Circulating Tumour Cells (CTCs) are known to be prognostic of patient survival. Although there are as yet no reliable markers associated with CTCs besides CTC number itself, there is a consensus that nucleaic acid, metabolite and protein analysis of CTCs are likely to yield a range of useful biomarkers of various kinds. CTCs are typically present in very small numbers, as few as one in a 7.5ml blood sample, and therefore reliable analysis of CTCs is a significant challenge. I present our progress on a platform technology designed to allow the analysis of copy number of cytosolic proteins at the single cell level without recourse to labeling methods such as GFP tagging. It is shown that the platform has both the sensitivity and precision to follow cell to cell variations. I also explain how the platform can in principle be adapted for the analysis of protein-protein interactions and potentially post translational modifications such as phosophorylation and mRNA copy number. Despite this encouraging progress some technical challenges remain and will also be discussed during the presentation. |