Development of an Epigenetic Biomarker discovery platform for liquid biopsis

Purpose and goal

Current non-invasive diagnostics often lag behind treatment advancements in many diseases, especially in early cancer detection, where late diagnosis reduces survival rate and raises costs. Population screening is instrumental for healthy living and disease management. Epigenica´s goal is to develop its proprietary epigenetic profiling technology to a universal biomarker discovery platform for liquid biopsies, aiding early detection and disease management.

Expected effects and result

An Epigenetic Biomarker discovery platform for liquid biopsies (universal for multiple disease). The first Stage encompasses maturing our technology for efficient and scalable analysis of liquid biopsy epigenomes, optimized for a minimal viable input volume of different sources (plasma, ascite fluid, CSF). The goal is a demonstration of a quantitative and multiplexed analysis of up to 24 samples against 6-8 epigenetic markers, encompassing blood plasma from cancer patients and healthy controls.

Planned approach and implementation

The first Stage encompasses maturing our technology for efficient and scalable analysis of liquid biopsy epigenomes, optimized for a minimal viable input volume of different sources (plasma, ascites fluid, CSF). This will be done by optimizing enzymatic adaptor ligation, test antibodies against 30-40 well-characterized histone PTMs, and optimizing for different input materials. The final experiment will be a demonstration of the optimized assay with material from ~12 cancer and ~12 control.