SBIR TOPIC: DEVELOPMENT OF DEVICES, DIAGNOSTIC TECHNOLOGIES, OR DIGITAL HEALTH TOOLS FOR TREATMENT, DETECTION, AND DIAGNOSIS OF PEDIATRIC CANCERS AND/OR RARE CANCERSPHASE I CONCEPT TITLE: EVALUATING

Inflammatory breast cancer (IBC) is a rare type of breast cancer with poor prognosis, and little detail on thepathogenesis of the disease. The high metastatic potential of IBC creates an urgent need to identifypossible biomarkers for early diagnosis and effective therapeutic treatment. MicroRNAs (miRs) are short,single strand RNAs that regulate gene expression and have been implicated as biomarkers in several othertypes of cancer. We have proposed that a quantum-based sensing technology using nitrogen-vacancycenter nanodiamonds could be developed to analyze miR expression in IBC archival tissue and could do thisdirectly without RNA or DNA amplification. During the Concept award, we used a confocal fluorescencemicroscope, with a microwave antenna to demonstrate the direct detection of different miRs in total RNAprepared from cell lines. Unfortunately, our contract expired before we could detect different miRs in totalRNA from FFPE tissue. Recently we developed a wide-field fluorescence microscope and used it to detectmicroRNAs extracted from FFPE of breast cancer (non-IBC) tissue. In this Phase I project we will completeour last milestone and validate a wide-field fluorescence instrument that can quickly analyze an array ofmiRs in far less time than our confocal system.