Monitoring progression of disease is important for patients suffering from cancer. Current biomarker diagnostic kits are either expensive or not sensitive enough. Thus, our research team came up with an idea to produce sensitive yet low cost kits to solve this problem. Thus the FABXS (Development of a diagnostic kit for the quantification of serum biomarkers using fluorescent affimer binders. FABXS. R&I_2020_003T) was conceived.
Our research team aims to develop a novel diagnostic kit for the quantification of a set of oncogenic serum biomarkers. These biomarkers may be used singly or in combination as prognostic biomarkers of aggressively metastatic cancers, indicators of remission/relapse and as predictive biomarkers for chemoresistance. Small synthetic binding proteins such as affimers and nanobodies are small single-domain antigen-binding proteins which will be employed as sensors to detect to detect the biomarkers in small amounts of body fluids.
The objective is to keep costs low while maximising sensitivity and reproducibility without the involvement of animals for the production of antibodies.
The 3-year FABXS project is an R&I FUSION Technology Development Programme (TDP) funded by the . The project will be a collaborative effort between researchers from the (Lead Partner) including (Principal Investigator), and from the together with the Sir Anthony Mamo Oncology Centre (SAMOC) team led by Dr Nick Refalo.
