NEOPRAD: Nanoparticle-Enhanced Capture and Optical Profiling for Rare Tumor Cell Analysis and Detection

Funded by the Research Council of Norway (RCN).

Multiple myeloma (MM) is a hematological cancer that remains incurable despite advances in treatment, due to inevitable relapse and treatment resistance. Monitoring circulating MM cells (CMMCs) in blood offers a promising, minimally invasive alternative to painful bone marrow biopsies for tracking disease progression and treatment response — but these cells are extremely rare, and current methods struggle to both capture and comprehensively analyze them.

This ongoing interdisciplinary project combines nanotechnology, biotechnology, and cancer biology to develop an integrated platform for efficient CMMC capture and single-cell molecular profiling. The approach uses tunable, functionalized magnetic iron oxide nanoparticles to selectively capture CMMCs from patient blood samples, paired with multiplexed optical profiling — an emerging imaging technique capable of reading out protein expression, gene expression, and genomic features at the single-cell level, offering a faster and less resource-intensive alternative to conventional sequencing-based diagnostics.

The project is structured around four objectives: engineering magnetic nanoparticles optimized for efficient, specific cell capture; validating and refining capture performance using samples of increasing biological complexity, including a miniaturized microfluidic capture platform; developing and applying multiplexed fluorescence imaging for detailed single-cell profiling of captured cells; and ultimately testing the full platform on a representative cohort of myeloma patient samples to explore both diagnostic potential and new insights into CMMC biology. The nanoparticle work builds on prior experience developing flash nanoprecipitation-based magnetic nanoparticle platforms, including the iron oxide nanoparticle-based extraction technology used in NTNU's COVID-19 test kits.

If successful, NEOPRAD aims to establish a blood-test-based diagnostic platform for closer, less burdensome monitoring of myeloma patients, while generating new biological insight into an incurable disease — with the underlying approach designed to be adaptable to other cancers involving circulating tumor cells in the future.