Main Host Institution: Institution: Pangaea Oncology, Barcelona – Spain.

Project Title: Validation of liquid biopsy-based analysis on the NanoString nCounter platform.

Project Background: My sub-project within ELBA will be to use the RNA of different blood-based biosources – tumor educated platelets (TEPs), cell-free RNA (cfRNA) and exosomal RNA (exoRNA) – in a relatively new and easy-to-use technique, known as the nCounter Nanostring. The differential expression pattern results will be used to 1) compare the accuracy of the different blood-derived sources 2) identify changes in the RNA of healthy individuals and early-stage cancer patients, to create signatures that can be used for screening and 3) find RNA expression signatures that enable us to determine which patients will respond to immunotherapy, and which patients should receive a different type of therapy.