Project description:Raw data for our manuscript in prep, titled: "Real time health monitoring through urine analysis: A preliminary observational study."
Project description:Current healthcare practices are reactive and based on limited physiological information collected months or years apart. By enabling patients and healthy consumers access to continuous measurements of health, wearable devices and digital medicine stand to realize highly personalized and preventative care. However, most current digital technologies provide information on a limited set of physiological traits, such as heart rate and step count, which alone offer little insight into the etiology of most diseases. Here we propose to integrate data from biohealth smartphone applications with continuous metabolic phenotypes derived from urine metabolites. This combination of molecular phenotypes with quantitative measurements of lifestyle reflect the biological consequences of human behavior in real time. We present data from an observational study involving two healthy subjects and discuss the challenges, opportunities, and implications of integrating this new layer of physiological information into digital medicine. Though our dataset is limited to two subjects, our analysis (also available through an interactive web-based visualization tool) provides an initial framework to monitor lifestyle factors, such as nutrition, drug metabolism, exercise, and sleep using urine metabolites.
Project description:This trial tests new methods and materials for the real-time chemotherapy-associated side effects monitoring support system (RT-CAMSS) in patients with gastrointestinal cancers undergoing chemotherapy. RT-CAMSS is a monitoring support system that provides patients with evidence-based information and side-effect management and coping skills, emotional support and validation, and proactive care via text messages and questionnaires as they undergo chemotherapy.
Project description:Regenerative cell therapies and stem-based in vitro models all aspire the approximation of a given start cell to an alternate (often more mature) cell state. However, ‘monitoring’, hence controlling, such a dynamic process requires disruption of the precious sample, destroying architecture and introducing variation. Here, we establish real time-compatible, fully non-invasive monitoring of cell fates through simple cell-free DNA medium sampling. We demonstrate that cell-free DNA methylation non-disruptively reveals genome-wide DNA methylation transitions during epigenetic drug treatment in stem cells, and reports the gradual maturation of 3D hepatocytes grown in bioreactors. Our cell-free DNA methylation platform enables monitoring a broad variety of in vitro systems, has implications for the real-time evaluation human therapeutic cells, and the potential to be readily integrated into large-scale bioreactor workflows.
Project description:Fermentation monitoring is a powerful tool for bioprocess development and optimisation. On-line metabolomics is a technology that is starting to gain attention as a bioprocess monitoring tool, allowing the direct measurement of many compounds in the fermentation broth at a very high time resolution. In this work, targeted on-line metabolomics was used to monitor 40 metabolites of interest during three Escherichia coli succinate production fermentation experiments every 5 minutes with a triple quadrupole mass spectrometer. This allowed capturing high time resolution biological data that can provide critical information for process optimisation. For 9 of these metabolites, simple univariate regression models were used to model compound concentration from their on-line mass spectrometry peak area. These on-line metabolomics univariate models performed comparably to vibrational spectroscopy multivariate PLS regressions models reported in the literature, which typically are much more complex and time consuming to build. In conclusion, this work shows how on-line metabolomics can be used to directly monitor many bioprocess compounds of interest and obtain rich biological and bioprocess data.
Project description:Treatment of MCF7 breast cancer cells by cisplatin leads to a very specific metabolic response and an onset of cell death about 10-11 h after beginning of treatment. For more detailed understanding of the molecular processes underlying the specific metabolic response, mRNA was isolated from MCF7 cells when the specific changes, (i) induction of glycolysis and (ii) onset of cell death, were detected during online measurement in the cell biosensor system.
Project description:<p>Aspartate is crucial for nucleotide synthesis, ammonia detoxification and maintaining redox balance via the malate-aspartate-shuttle (MAS). To disentangle these multiple roles of aspartate metabolism, tools are required that measure aspartate concentrations in real time and in live cells. We introduce AspSnFR, a genetically encoded green fluorescent biosensor for intracellular aspartate, engineered through displaying and screening biosensor libraries on mammalian cells. In live cells, AspSnFR is able to precisely and quantitatively measure cytosolic aspartate concentrations and dissect its production from glutamine. Combining high-content imaging of AspSnFR with pharmacological perturbations exposes differences in metabolic vulnerabilities of aspartate levels based on nutrient availability. Further, AspSnFR facilitates tracking of aspartate export from mitochondria through SLC25A12, the MAS’ key transporter. We show that SLC25A12 is a rapidly responding and direct route to couple Ca2+ signaling with mitochondrial aspartate export. This establishes SLC25A12 as a crucial link between cellular signaling, mitochondrial respiration and metabolism.</p>
Project description:While it is well known that cell-free RNA (cfRNA) can be isolated from urine, the diagnostic potential of this urine cfRNA, especially in comparison to plasma cfRNA, remains underexplored. Here, we directly compared the utility of urine cfRNA and plasma cfRNA for the monitoring of systemic and urinary tract related complications. We analyzed 297 matched plasma and urine cfRNA isolates obtained from three cohorts of patients: Hematopoietic Stem Cell Transplant (HSCT) recipients, patients with acute kidney injury (AKI), and healthy volunteers. The data highlight the unique cellular origins and properties of urinary and plasma RNA. Most importantly, we find that although plasma cfRNA is a superior analyte for monitoring immune and systemic complications, urinary cfRNA is more sensitive to complications of the urinary tract, including cell-type specific injury in the kidney. These findings highlight the potential of urine cfRNA as a novel analyte in diagnostic medicine.