Early Cancer Detection

Cancer is one of the leading causes of death worldwide with 10 million deaths in 2020. In the past years, the global oncology spending has been constantly increasing reaching a total of 167 billion U.S. dollars in 2020.   
For a successful treatment of the disease, early detection is crucial and results in a low mortality rate. Effective for early detection, screening campaigns are pivotal both for monitoring the health of the population and for reducing the burden on the national health system. However, affordable and accessible screening programs with non-invasive techniques are still not available. Moreover, existing cancer diagnostic tests often do not detect cancer at its early stages (0-I).    
Nematodes behavioral responses to biofluids from cancer patients have been investigated for many years. Independent labs are currently working on the development of cancer screening tests exploiting the remarkable ability of C. Elegans nematodes to sense cancer smell, which are highly attracted by biofluids from people with cancer while they are repelled by those of healthy people. C. elegans can detect cancer smell also at very early stages with an accuracy higher than that of standard biomarkers.      
D-Tails recently found evidence that behavioral and neuronal responses of nematodes are strictly related to the specific content of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in biofluids of breast and prostate cancer patients. Nanomolar sensitivity of the olfactory system in C. Elegans enables it to detect subtle alterations of specific VOCs caused by the disease, not detectable with existing standard techniques. Our team exploited this ability to perform screening tests on people with breast cancer reaching an accuracy above 97%, which outperforms currently available biomarkers.    
Via bioengineering, we also uncovered the molecular pathways mediating cancer discriminating behavior in nematodes. Cancer types detected by nematodes are of several types (including lung, prostate, pancreatic, breast, and colon), each with its own VOCs selection causing the stimulation of distinctive molecular patterns in the nematode olfactory system.    
Our next challenge is to transfer this knowledge into an affordable and easy-to-use test-kit compatible with high-throughput screening formats. We are currently focusing on two of the most incident cancer types and on the most lethal and less treatable one: breast, prostate and pancreatic, respectively.    
In the past years, D-Tails filed two patents related to the new technologies and methodologies developed to pursue our aim. 

Early Alzheimer Disease detection

A​ fundamental problem of AD concern the unavailability of early  detection methods and lack of efficient monitoring of disease progression prior to the onset of behavioral deficit. For the last ten years, the scientific community has found evidence of modifications in the eye retina directly associated with AD that can possibly match the modification occurring in the brain tissue.
Among these modification, the occurrence of Beta-Amyloid plaques and Tau aggregates are paramount. Nevertheless, small aggregates in the retina are exceedingly small and Tau protein specific fluorescence labels for in vivo tracking on patients are not available. 

On these premises, D-Tails focus on three spedific domains: 

• Biochemistry, f​or the development of new fluorescent labels specific for the Tau protein for systemic administration;
• Biology, f​or all the basic knowledge of the AD effects on the retina and the analytical test on the efficiency and specificity of the new labels
• Optical Instrumentation , for a new approach to retina imaging that bypasses the resolution limits of the numerical aperture of the eye (patent pending). The following steps comprise the engineering development of a portable prototype and the implementation of a Neural Network, which will be used to minimize the image acquisition time and to further improve signal to noise and resolution performance.