Dr. Tatu Rojalin is awarded the 2021 OCERN Research Grant!!
Congrats to Tatu, who was named this year's recipient of the Ovarian Cancer Education and Research Network (OCERN) annual research grant!
OCERN website link: http://ocern.org
Here is the lay abstract for the award to give you an idea of the project scope:
Circulating ovarian cancer-associated extracellular vesicles (OvCa-EVs) shuttle nefarious chemical messengers through bodily fluids to mediate pro-tumor function. Their rapid isolation and identification are of great interest for adoption into liquid biopsy platforms, since they may represent a specific snapshot of the tumor state. Here we propose the development of highly sensitive, specific, and inexpensive dual-detection method for early-stage OvCa-EVs. Our approach is based on binding targeted nanoparticles that sense tumor-specific features of OvCa-EVs to detect these needles amongst the haystack.