Researchers at The Institute of Cancer Research (ICR), London, are taking advantage of the single-cell encapsulation capabilities of Dolomite Bio’s Single Cell RNASeq system to investigate resistance mechanisms in prostate cancer. Karolina Nowakowska, a PhD student at ICR, explained: “Our team is focused on studying treatment resistance in prostate cancer patients, looking at the biochemical mechanisms responsible. My project is based on using single-cell sequencing to help identify the specific genes which lead to treatment resistance, trying to identify biomarkers and, in the longer term, treatments that will allow a more personalised approach to therapy.”
“Initially, I was using FACS to perform manual sorting of cells into individual wells, but this is both time-consuming and laborious, limiting me to a maximum of 20 cells per experiment. As throughput is crucial in biomarker discovery, we wanted to perform our investigations on a much larger scale, and, following recent research (Macosko EZ, Basu A, Satija R et al. Highly parallel genome-wide expression profiling of individual cells using nanoliter droplets. Cell 2015; 161 [5]: 1202–14) we decided that microfluidics was the way forward.
“After a demonstration of the system at Dolomite Bio’s headquarters near Cambridge, we chose the Single Cell RNASeq system, and can now run over 1000 cells per experiment. Although we have only just finished optimising our protocols, the throughput is very impressive and the system offers good reproducibility. The beauty of this technique is that it allows you to view many cellular events simultaneously, and, once optimised, it is more cost-effective than manually sorting and sequencing cells.”