The CAMINEMS project is supported by the European Commission and aims at developing new tools based on microfluidics and nanotechnologies, to improve cancer diagnosis and prognosis.
Cancer causes about 13% of all deaths in the world and thus represents a huge problem in public health. In particular, today, about 90% of cancer deaths are due to metastases and therapeutic escape.
At the origin of metastases are Circulating Tumour Cells (CTC), individual cells or small cellular issued from the primary cancer and transiently circulated in the blood. It would be a major breakthrough for treatments to be able to perform a detailed molecular characterisation on CTC before they develop into metastases.
Besides this major diagnosis and prognosis application, being able to capture and to study CTC would also be a highly valuable help in research, for understanding their metabolism, and their response to existing or candidate drugs.
