Yun Wu, PhD, Technology Impact Award Recipient State University of New York (SUNY) Buffalo Area of Research: All Cancers Checkpoint immunotherapies targeting the PD-1/PD-L1 pathway—especially when combined with chemotherapy—have improved how we treat advanced lung cancer, especially non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), the most common form. However, most patients still don’t respond, and being able to quickly detect this enables other treatment options to be considered without missing the best treatment window. Currently, physical tumor samples—biopsies—are used for analysis, but obtaining them can be invasive and cannot be done frequently for monitoring over time. To address this issue, Dr. Wu is developing a cutting-edge liquid biopsy test named Exo-PROS, which uses a small chip-like device and allows the quantification of circulating biomarkers in blood to screen patients for immunotherapy and monitor treatment responses. Already, Wu’s team has observed promising results and found that circulating biomarkers successfully distinguished immunotherapy responders from non-responders. Now they plan to further validate Exo-PROS assay in larger numbers of patients and demonstrate its clinical utility in precision cancer immunotherapy. Projects and Grants Exosome Protein microRNA One Stop (Exo-PROS) Biosensor: a New Liquid Biopsy for Precision Cancer Immunotherapy State University of New York, Buffalo | All Cancers | 2020
