SC2: Biomarkers in Liquid Biopsy: CTCs, ctDNA and Exosomes

MONDAY, 18 MAY | 14:00 – 17:00

ABOUT THIS COURSE:
Biomarkers for early disease detection, therapeutic efficacy monitoring and outcome prediction are the key to precision medicine. Liquid Biopsy studies disease biomarkers in body fluids and can be paramount for precision medicine in cancer. The analysis of biomarkers in peripheral blood improves cancer diagnosis and treatment success.

This course will give you a comprehensive overview and update on the established biomarkers, available technologies and clinical applications of liquid biopsy.

COURSE OUTLINE

• Introduction
• Traditional cancer biomarkers and biomarkers in liquid biopsy
• Advances in enabling technology
• Clinical applications
• The sampling dilemma
• Roundtable: What is still needed to get into routine clinical practice?
• Concluding remarks

INSTRUCTOR BIOGRAPHIES:

Lorena Diéguez, PhD, Group Leader, Medical Devices Research Group, International Iberian Nanotechnology Laboratory, Portugal
Lorena Diéguez joined INL in 2014 as Staff Researcher and is, since May 2018, the leader of the Medical Devices group. Her research is focused in the development of biomicrofluidic devices mainly devoted to Translational Medical Research in close collaboration with Hospitals. For that purpose, her work is devoted to the development of integrated biosensing systems and nanobioengineered diagnostics microsystems for the isolation and characterization of Tumor Cells from body fluids of cancer patients, as well as the development of microfluidic organ-on-a-chip 3D models. Lorena is also very interested in translating her technology from the lab to the clinic, and she has been very active in her endeavours as entrepreneur, creating the spin-off company RUBYnanomed in the field of liquid biopsy.

She obtained her Bachelor’s degree in Physics and her Masters in Optoelectronics at the University of Santiago de Compostela in 2005, then completed her Masters in Nanoscience and Nanotechnology at the University of Barcelona (UB) in 2007 and obtained her PhD in Nanosciences in optical and electrochemical biosensors at the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia and the ETH Zürich. Her postdoctoral research at the University of South Australia (UniSA) from 2010 was devoted to the study of rare cells from biological samples using microfluidics.

Roberto Piñeiro Cid, PhD, Cancer Modeling Lab, Instituto de Investigación Sanitaria de Santiago de Compostela- Roche-Chus Joint Unit
Roberto Piñeiro completed his Bachelor’s degree in Biology and PhD. at the University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain). He then moved to the UK for his postdoctoral studies where he worked at Barts Cancer Institute Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) and UCL Cancer Institute, University College London (UCL). During this period Roberto worked in the field of cancer cell biology, studying aspects such as cancer cell signalling and tumour microenvironment. Since august 2016 Roberto is leading the Cancer Modelling Lab at the Roche-Chus Joint Unit, Santiago de Compostela Clinical Hospital (Spain). His lab is focused in understanding the biology of those cells responsible for seeding cancer metastasis, the circulating tumour cells (CTCs). His research is particularly aimed to study the biology of CTC-clusters and their contribution to cancer metastasis.