Study level
- Honours
Faculty/School
Faculty of Science
Topic status
We're looking for students to study this topic.
Supervisors
- Position
- Adjunct Associate Professor
- Division / Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- Position
- Senior Lecturer
- Division / Faculty
- Faculty of Science
External supervisors
- Dr Lance Liotta, George Mason University
Overview
Extracellular vesicles (EVs) are membrane bound packages of information constantly being released by all living cells, including bacteria.
There are many types and sizes of EVs. Each EV type contains its own distinctive cargo consisting of characteristic DNA, RNA, and proteins.
We are just beginning to understand the many roles of EVs to maintain the health of the cell producing the EVs, and to communicate with other cell types that take up the EVs produced by neighbouring cells. Since EVs act as a communication highway between cells and tissues, EV biology is a new exciting, and exploding, field of research.
Importantly, EVs can be drivers of disease. Cells infected with bacteria or viruses, for example, release EVs that travel to other cells and trigger the recipient cells to be more susceptible to the further spread of the virus. The EVs shed from infected cells can suppress the immune system so that it fails to stop the infection. We can measure the EVs shed by infected cells in the patient’s urine, blood or saliva as a new test for infection, or to provide strategies for vaccines.
In addition, EVs play an important role in cancer. Within a growing patient’s tumor EVs are constantly being produced. We can detect the tumor EVs in the patient’s body fluids such as blood, urine, and lymph, thus constituting a new class of biomarkers for early cancer detection. We can also characterize the contents of the circulating tumor EVs in order to eavesdrop on the state of the tumor.
Research activities
We will be developing an exciting and novel mathematical model of EV transport for this project. We will formulate a set of differential equations that capture the communication between different cells via the transfer of EVs. We will also develop a compartmental model of EV shedding from diseased tissues into body fluids (eg. lymph, urine) that can generate valuable diagnostic biomarkers.
We have access to new experimental data from time-course experiments, and will attempt to fit our model to this data.
Outcomes
The outcome of this project will be a full mathematical model, calibrated to unique experimental data, of intercellular communication via extracellular vesicles (EVs). This has the potential to be a very useful tool in the future development of diagnostic tests that may be able to detect the presence of early-stage disease via the capture of biomarkers shed from EVs.
Skills and experience
Students wanting to take on this project should have completed at least four full semesters of a mathematically-focussed degree program (eg. Bachelor of Mathematics) by the start of the project. The student should have a basic familiarity with ordinary differential equations, and have some experience with computational mathematics and coding (eg. in Matlab).
Keywords
Contact
Contact r.araujo@qut.edu.au for more information.