Development of microphotonic technologies for liquid biopsies

The recent development of sophisticated techniques capable of detecting extremely low concentrations of circulating tumor biomarkers in accessible body fluids, such as blood or urine, is contributing to a paradigm shift in cancer diagnosis and treatment. By applying such techniques, clinicians can carry out liquid biopsies, providing information on tumor presence, evolution, and response to therapy. The implementation of biosensing platforms for liquid biopsies is particularly complex because this application domain demands high selectivity/specificity and challenging limit-of-detection (LoD) values. The interest in photonics as an enabling technology for liquid biopsies is growing owing to the well-known advantages of photonic biosensors over competing technologies in terms of compactness, immunity to external disturbance, and ultra-high spatial resolution.
Some encouraging experimental results in the field of photonic devices and systems for liquid biopsy have already been achieved by using fluorescent labels and label-free techniques and by exploiting super-resolution microscopy, surface plasmon resonance, surface-enhanced Raman scattering, and whispering gallery mode resonators, but there are crucial open research challenges.
The PhD activity could be focused on: i) CTCs characterization by SERS; ii) single exosome detection by WGM resonators; iii) chip-based super-resolution microscopy for liquid biopsy.

The details can be discussed with Prof. Dell’Olio ([Email Address Removed]).
A Master of Science in Electronics or Physics with specialization in PHOTONICS is higlhy appreciated.
A basic knowledge of integrated microphotonics and the methods currently used for designing integrated microphotonic devices (BPM, FEM, FDTD) is higlhy appreciated,too.