Steve Soper,
Foundation Distinguished Professor, Director, Center of BioModular Multi-scale System for Precision Medicine,
The University of Kansas
Prof. Soper (since 2016) is a Foundation Distinguished Professor in Chemistry and Mechanical Engineering at the University of Kansas. At KUMC, Prof. Soper holds an adjunct appointment in the Cancer Biology Department and is a member of the KU Cancer Center. He also holds an appointment at Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology in Ulsan, South Korea, where he is a World Class University Professor.
As a result of his efforts, Prof. Soper has secured extramural funding totaling >$125M, has published over 245 peer-reviewed manuscripts (h index = 70; >17,000 citations); 31 book chapters and 71 peer-reviewed conference proceeding papers, and is the author of 12 patents. He is also the founder of a startup company, BioFluidica, which is marketing devices for the isolation and enumeration of liquid biopsy markers. Soper recently founded a second company, Sunflower Genomics, which is seeking to market a new DNA/RNA single-molecule sequencing platform. His list of awards includes Ralph Adams Award in Bioanalytical Chemistry, 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 50 PhDs and 7 MS degrees to students under his mentorship. He currently heads a group of 15 researchers.
His major discoveries include: (1) Technology for the detection of liquid biopsy markers that can manage a variety of diseases using a simple blood test (test has been demonstrated in multiple myeloma, pediatric acute lymphoblastic leukemia, acute myeloid leukemia, pancreatic, breast, colorectal, prostate, and ovarian cancers); (2) new hardware and assay for the point-of-care diagnosis of acute ischemic stroke; (3) single-molecule DNA and RNA sequencing nanotechnology; and (4) currently working on a home-test for COVID-19 infections (handheld instrument and the associated assay.
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Mixed-Scale Fluidic System: Searching for Drug-induced DNA Damage in Circulating Tumor CellsMonday, 2 October 2017 at 16:45 Improved therapies that yield more cures and better overall survival for
cancer patients are needed. For example, women with breast cancer have a
5-year survival rate of 22% (Stage IV) and 72% (Stage III).
Doxorubicin, cisplatin, paclitaxel, and tamoxifen are examples of drugs
used for treating breast cancer with selection of therapy typically
based on the classification and staging of the patient’s cancer. While
treatment regimens assigned to some patients may be optimal using the
current classification model, others within certain breast cancer
sub-types fail therapy. New assays must be developed to determine how a
patient’s physiology and genetic makeup affects drug efficacy. In this
presentation, a series of chips are used for the isolation and
processing of circulating tumor cells (CTCs). The chips quantify
response to therapy using three pieces of information secured from the
CTCs; (1) CTC number; (2) CTC viability; and (3) the frequency of DNA
damage (abasic (AP) sites) in genomic DNA (gDNA) harvested from the
CTCs. Microscale chips are used for CTC selection, CTC enumeration and
viability determinations. The chip to read AP sites is a nanosensor chip
made via nano-imprinting in plastics and contains a nanochannel with
dimensions less than the persistence length of double-stranded DNA (~50
nm). Labeling AP sites with fluorescent dyes and stretching the gDNA in
the nanochannel to near its full contour length allows for the direct
readout of the AP sites, even from a single CTC. This information is
used to determine how a patient is responding to therapy.
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