Nanofluidic chips device for the measurement of biomarkers found in epsilon quantity in human biological samples – EPSILOMICS

Significant advances in medicine and medical diagnosis in the understanding and treatment of diseases have always been accompanied by the advances in physics, optics and electronics that have made it possible to observe the living matter with a growing acuity. Nowadays, the means of observing the cells, the tissues or the human body are such that the quantity of data coming from these observations is gigantic, too great for a human being to integrate them by himself. It is so great that it was personified by giving it the name "big data". Despite this, the human body and cells remain a territorial dimension to explore as vast as our universe. Although progress has been noticeable and has accelerated since the advent of the third millennium, little is known about the cellular and biochemical mechanisms of cancer, for example. This is evidenced by the difficulty that medicine has to detect cancer early, to anticipate their recurrences and to practice what everyone is talking about, "personalized medicine". We decided together, fundamentalists, clinicians, surgeons and biologists, academics and industrials, in a joint research synergy, with the same vision of research, the same spirit, the same positive energy, to work not in parallel but together. This aspect is far from being trivial and is the first originality of our project. We hope that the reader will feel this through the reading of the manuscript. Our team has been working on developing new tools for personalized medicine, which is now turning to new challenges such as circulating tumor cells and extracellular vesicles with the most representative exosomes. These figured elements contain a complex mosaic of molecules of the biological signal, which they carry throughout the organism by shuttling between all the cells. They are involved in the genesis of the cancer, its spread and probably its resistance to chemotherapy and radiotherapy. These elements are so small that no laboratory instrument is capable today of analyzing the contents or the surface in a reproducible way. We propose to develop a miniaturized laboratory instrument embedding nanopores coupled to a microfluidic system capable of quantifying the metabolomic or proteomic content of a cell or an exosome. We benefit from a consortium of qualified experts in all fields that are useful to us, including an industrial capable of enhancing our innovations and a patent protecting a first prototype. Our work offers us a fabulous opportunity to better understand the mechanisms of cancer and opens a multi-billion-dollar ambulatory medicine and biology market. This ANR call is of major economic importance for French research and industry in an international context that is extremely competitive regarding the size of the targeted markets.