SMART: Stratified Medicine through Advanced Raman Technologies

SMART - Stratified Medicine through Advanced Raman Technologies: The potential for Raman spectroscopy to provide early and improved specificity of diagnosis on a wide range of unprocessed tissue and biopsy samples and in-vivo is well documented. However, constraints on analysis speed, instrument complexity and sample prep and handling, has prevented adoption for routine use. SMART builds on existing technology to provide an automated, fast and simple to use Pathology tool to improve diagnostic rates, specificity of diagnosis and early detection. SMART adopts a suite of sample handling and management protocols to closely mirror existing pathology lab and surgery processes, enabling ease of adoption. Importantly, functionality and methods will be developed to ensure compatibility with digital pathology enabling highly complementary Raman chemical imaging data to supplement existing gold standard techniques. In order to verify these capabilities, the project will build a significant chemometric model for GI disease across 3 clinical centres, using both FFPE and snap frozen tissue sections in parallel with existing gold standard IHC, FISH and H&E techniques.

To fully capitalise on our international lead, we now seek funding to progress this work in a timely manner by developing a novel medical diagnostic platform. We propose to bring together key players from multidisciplinary areas covering physical sciences, spectroscopy and histopathology to exploit all of the relevant skills and develop a critical mass of researchers.