Dr Bob Carr, chief technical officer at Nanosight, will be speaking at the 2010 Technology World/Nanoforum event at the Excel centre in London on 7 December.
Carr will discuss the potential of nanotechnology for early disease detection.
The condition pre-eclampsia in pregnant women remains a prominent cause of maternal and perinatal death.
Pre-eclampsia is symptomless for most of its course and is relentlessly progressive; no other complication of pregnancy is so common and so dangerous for both mother and baby.
Exosomes are 30-100nm vesicles formed in blood as they shed from cells.
Known to have key roles in intercellular communication, exosomes are promising biomarkers for early detection of pre-eclampsia.
To date, developments in this area have been constrained by limitations in the technology available for measurement of exosomes.
Electron microscopy, western blotting, enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays and conventional flow cytometry all have weaknesses in detection and characterisation of exosomes.
Working with researchers at Oxford Radcliffe Hospitals/University of Oxford, Nanosight has developed technology that can detect and phenotype exosomes.
Starting in 2005, Nanosight developed a method of laser illumination that enables detection and counting of populations of nanoparticles in real time and with little sample preparation.
This method, Nanoparticle Tracking Analysis (NTA), simultaneously measures sizes of many particles on a particle-by-particle basis to give a detailed particle size distribution.
Supported by a grant from the Wellcome Trust, the teams have combined fluorescent labelling with NTA to produce a capability to speciate these exosomes.
This development effectively extends the power of flow cytometry downwards by nearly one order of magnitude to the 50-600nm size range, and will perhaps provide early detection of a range of thrombosis-related disease.
