Quantum Sensing Integrated with Ultrasound for Precise Drug Screening

The goal of this proposal is to develop a quantum sensing device to accelerate drug development processand increase its success rate. The proposed device is based on the super-resolution force spectroscopy(SURFS) technique invented by the PI and co-PI. SURFS offers a force resolution of below one piconewtonwhich is sufficient to distinguish the binding strengths between drug molecules with similar structures andbetween nucleic acids with only a single nucleotide difference. Compared to other force-based techniquesSURFS has twenty times better resolution and approximately five orders of magnitude higher detectionefficiency. Therefore if successfully commercialized SURFS may be a revolutionary technique to benefit drugdevelopment with unprecedented data. This STTR proposal will implement several strategies to achieve thisgoal. The first is to integrate a commercial optically pumped magnetometer with an array of piezo disks forforce generation. This combination will make the device easy to use and much cheaper than the currentcompeting devices. The second is to resolve the multiple samples located on a standard multi-well plate withunique methods to resolve these samples. This will dramatically improve the detection efficiency as nomagnetic device can detect multiple samples at this moment. The outcome of this proposal will be a uniqueapparatus that will be an important asset towards precision medicine. The proposed activities will also produce the much desired but currently unavailable data regarding theselectivity of chemotherapy drugs. Despite the variety of drug combinations currently being used it remainsunclear on how strong the selectivity is especially for drugs with highly similar structures. Therefore the datawill contribute towards filling the knowledge gap between drug structures and their preferred target sequences.This proposal focuses on the chirality and excess hydroxyl groups of the drug molecules and the methylation ofthe DNA sequences which are major factors at the molecular level for drug design. Potentially the high-resolution force measurements for drug binding with their biomolecular targets obtained with the proposedSURFS device can serve as a new parameter to guide the optimization process of drug development whichwill shorten the process reduce the cost and increase the success rate.