There Will Be Blood: Adventures in next-generation biomarker mining

The presence of cell-free circulating nucleic acids in blood plasma was discovered in 1948 by Mandel and Metais. It took almost seven decades to develop clinical cell-free circulating nucleic acid-based assays, but in recent years, the diagnostic applications of cell-free nucleic acids have blossomed. Cell-free nucleic acids diagnostic tests, or "liquid biopsies", are now in use, or in clinical trial, for prenatal diagnosis, cancer diagnosis and cancer treatment monitoring, bloodstream infection diagnosis and transplant monitoring.

In our lab, we have developed a number of microfluidic-based tools aimed at (one day) facilitating the use of cell-free DNA in the clinic. In this seminar, I will review some of our latest advances, and our progress on the road from lab demonstrators to products. Finally, I will discuss what the future might look like when fast sample preparation unites with real-time sequencing, highlighting recent collaborations with Nigeria and Japan.