From treatment to answers in hours

What if the answer to whether a targeted cancer therapy is working could arrive within hours rather than months?

In precision oncology, treatment decisions depend on knowing whether a drug is actually engaging its target. In practice that answer often takes weeks or months, until imaging reveals a change in the tumor. A faster, functional readout would let clinicians and drug developers see far earlier whether a therapy is doing what it was designed to do.

In a new study led by Prof. Doron Gerber of the Mina and Everard Goodman Faculty of Life Sciences and the Bar-Ilan Institute of Nanotechnology and Advanced Materials (BINA) at Bar-Ilan University, together with Shaked Doron, Lev Brio, Matan Krasner and Efrat Barbiro-Michaely, the team developed a microfluidic assay for rapid cancer-biomarker quantification and functional evaluation of therapy.

The platform requires only 5 microliters of sample, uses commercially available antibodies and removes the laborious sample-handling steps that slow conventional immunoassays. Beyond measuring how much of a protein is present, it reports on the protein's biological activity.

The assay detected the VEGF and EML4-ALK proteins in both lung-cancer cell-culture supernatant and serum-spiked samples, with a detection sensitivity fifteen times greater than a standard ELISA using the same antibody pairs.

In a proof-of-concept experiment the researchers tracked phosphorylation of EML4-ALK following treatment with the tyrosine-kinase inhibitor alectinib, capturing a significant and rapid decrease in phosphorylation levels, a direct functional signature of drug action rather than an indirect one.

The work is at a preclinical stage and was carried out in laboratory models. The authors present it as a foundation for future validation in patient-derived ALK-positive samples, where such a platform could support faster and more precise assessment of therapeutic response.

Congratulations to Prof. Doron Gerber and the entire research team on a contribution that shows how microfluidics, engineering and biology can converge on the next generation of diagnostic and precision-medicine tools.

Read the full paper published in Biosensors: https://doi.org/10.3390/bios16090484