Nanosight has contributed to the development of instrumentation and methodologies aimed at measuring cellular nanoparticles in plasma and urine, as biomarkers of a broad range of human diseases.
The research will be led by a world-class team from the University of Oxford, which has recently been awarded a Wellcome Trust Technology Development Grant to work on the detection and characterisation of nanoparticles in the early detection of human disease.
The team, led by Professor Ian Sargent at the Women's Centre in the John Radcliffe Hospital, part of the Oxford Biomedical Research Centre, includes Professor Chris Redman (Obstetrics and Gynaecology), Dr Paul Harrison (Haemophilia and Thrombosis Centre), Professor Adrian Harris (Cancer Research UK) and Professor Peter Dobson (Begbroke Science Park).
Other collaborators include Dr Leanne Hodson and Dr Frederick Karpe of the Oxford Centre for Diabetes, Endocrinology and Metabolism.
This project involves the detection in the bloodstream of tiny fragments of cells, microparticles (100nm-1um) and exosomes (30nm-100nm), which are important in how cells communicate with each other.
The numbers of these particles have been found to be significantly raised in the blood of patients with a number of diseases, including heart disease, diabetes, pre-eclampsia, clotting problems and cancer, raising the possibility that measuring these particles in blood could be used to predict those at risk.
However, their detection and size distribution measurement pose considerable challenges.
A fluorescence variant of Nanosight's instrumentation will be developed by Nanosight, in collaboration with the Oxford scientists, to enable these micro- and nanoparticles to be detected and characterised in plasma and urine samples for the first time.
By breaking through the limitations of existing fluorescence microparticle technology (such as flow cytometry) Nanosight hopes to help open up a class of diagnostic biomarkers in the fight against some of the most common and important diseases to afflict humans.
