Ricerc@Sapienza

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is an aggressive malignancy that is unresponsive to conventional radiation and chemotherapy. It carries a poor prognosis, which is related to both tumor biology and advanced stage at the moment of detection. Avoiding delayed diagnosis is therefore crucial, thus novel, safe and non-invasive tools for cancer detection are urgently needed. Recent advances in multidisciplinary approaches introduced the exciting possibility of detecting blood biomarkers by mass spectrometry. More interestingly, different innovative methods focus on the interactions among nanoparticles (NPs) and blood plasma molecules. Indeed, upon incubation with human plasma, NPs act as concentrators of molecules, which adsorb on their surface and form an outer biomolecular layer, or protein corona (PC). Features and composition of the PC depend on NP¿s properties (size, shape, surface chemistry), environmental factors (temperature, PH) and molecular source, i.e. the biological medium within which the NP is embedded. Thus, the detection of specific corona proteins, which are related to pathological conditions, could represent an effective way to exploit NP-blood interactions for diagnostic purposes. The main aim of this project is the development of a PC-based blood test for PDAC early cancer detection and staging, by exploiting some peculiar properties of graphene oxide (GO) nanoparticles. The use of GO-PC in diagnostics is extremely promising as GO can selectively adsorb plasma proteins which are poorly concentrated and the adsorbed protein patterns can be varied by modulating size, concentration. In this project, we will study these properties to burst pancreatic cancer test sensitivity in the detection of minor protein changes at the very early stages of disease. We predict that a systematic investigation of GO-BC may improve our knowledge of PDAC biology and that the BC technology may offer new opportunities for PDAC detection and biomarkers identification.