Project leader

Xavier Gidrol Laboratoire BGE Biomics team CEA-Grenoble 17 avenue des Martyrs 38 054 Grenoble Phone: 33 (0)4 38 78 97 96

Biomarkers provide information about the presence of a disease, its progression and the potential effect of drugs on disease evolution. Validated biomarkers could help streamline drug discovery as well as personalized medicine. We propose to develop a novel method based on nanoparticles-mediated nucleic acid delivery and fluorescent activated cell sorting (FACS) to identify and validate important biomarkers in oncology. While US death rates from prostate cancer (PC) have fallen about 4% per year since 1992, five years after the introduction of prostate-specific-antigen (PSA) testing, at the same time recent reports and practice guidelines cite the unproven benefit of PSA screening showing that it comes at the cost of substantial risk of overdiagnosis and overtreatment -with known downstream adverse effects.

As a consequence, clinicians express a striking need for new predictive diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers in prostate carcinogenesis. Our consortium proposes to take advantages of the recent progress in nanoparticles (Lipidots^®) design and synthesis to develop a technological platform for biomarker discovery in PC. This platform will combine two technological innovations: 1 A fluorescent Lipidots^®-mediated coding strategy and RNAi delivery. 2 A FACS-based high throughput and high content functional RNAi screening. Finally, Lipidots^® could facilitate delivery, specificity and stability of RNAi therapeutics and could arouse the interest of companies involved in that growing sector.