Team:EPFL/Demonstrate
Demonstrate
Introduction
From the interviews that we had for Integrated Human Practices and Entrepreneurship part of our project, we found out that there are important unmet medical needs in the field of cancer therapeutic (Entrepreneurship). By CAPOEIRA we has envisioned to provide a complete solution to patients and doctors to utilize the full potential of personalized medicine by both providing fully personalized vaccines and a monitoring system to evaluate patients’ response to treatment faster, more reliably, and easily.
Bioinformatics
The first step for developing any personalized therapy is analysing patient’s genome to identify cancer’s fingerprints in patients: Neoantigens. We integrated the state-of-the-art genomics tools in our software, Ginga, that serves as the starting point in our project. With Ginga, we are able to discover neoantigens that are presented uniquely in the surface of tumor cells. We validated our software with 8 patients data extracted from Sequence Read Archive (SRA) toolkit. Our software, the documentations and manual are online on our Github repository.
Vaccine Therapy
By having the neoantigens list, we then moved to the next stage: producing personalized vaccines. We used Encapsulin nanocarriers as a delivery platform for personalized cancer vaccine. We then used cell-free protein expression system for high throughput production of our personalized vaccine. We were able to demonstrate the efficiency of our cell-free expression system by expressing sfGFP and then measuring fluorescence. We then demonstrated the expression and purification of our vaccine production system by extensive measurements through SDS-PAGE and DLS measurements.
We then demonstrated the expression and purification of our vaccine production system by extensive measurements through SDS-PAGE and DLS measurements.
Further, we tested our constructed plasmid by incorporating OT1 coding sequence into our platform. The measurements from SDS-Page and Mass-spec clearly demonstrated our vaccine production and purification steps in our platform.
Vaccine Monitoring
Relapse Detection