Global battle against cancer is not possible to be won by treatment alone, prevention is always better than cure and early stage cancer detection can prevent the mortality casued by this fatal disease every year. In our research, we are functionalizing a carbon nanomaterial fullerene (C60) with folic acid in the fabrication of highly sensitive biosensor for the detection of early stage cancer.
Folic acid is an essential nutrient for any type of cell growth and that’s why when the cells become cancerous they need more folic acid for their abnormal and rapid growth. This folic acid intake inside the cell is carried out by folate receptors. Folate receptor is a cell membrane protein and it has high affinity to folic acid. So in cancer cell we see a remarkable overexpression of folate receptor to supply the folic acid demand for the rapid growth of cells. To use fullerene for the detection of early stage cancer, the first step of our work is to link it with folic acid by chemical reaction. Now when we will introduce the fullerene-folic acid conjugate to the folate receptors a biochemical reaction will occur between the folic acid part and the folate receptor of cells. Due to this biochemical reaction there will be a flow of electrons which will be carried out by fullerene to a biosensor circuit to produce a readable data which will indicate the amount of folate receptors in some particular cell line and that ultimately will tell us about the presence and progression of cancer.
This project is currently funded by the ‘Fundamental Research Grant Scheme (FRGS), under the Ministry of Higher Education (MOHE), Malaysia; and very recently a detail review on functionalized fullerene has been published by our research group, doi:10.1016/j.bios.2014.07.044, another paper on our latest experiments and findings are under construction for future publication.
For more details or further queries and any kind of collaboration please feel free to contact below,
Sivakumar.Manickam@nottingham.edu.my (Project Head and Research Supervisor)
Kasturi.Muthoosamy@nottingham.edu.my (Project Member and Co-Supervisor)
kebx4sae@nottingham.edu.my (Research Project (PhD) Student)