• Professor Sunghoon Kwon’s Team of SNU Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

 
 
SNU College of Engineering (Dean Kookheon Char) announced on the 21st that a research team led by Professor Sunghoon Kwon of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering has developed the next-generation liquid biopsy technology with a research team led by Professor Wonshik Han of SNU Hospital. The technique, developed for the early diagnosis of cancer, allows precise analysis of very rare blood circulating tumor cells that flow out of solid cancer.
 
Vast amounts of essential information about solid cancer is found to be hidden in the circulating tumor cells that originate from solid cancer. Thus, analyzing rare circulating tumor cells flowing out of the cancer tissue through the cancer patient's blood can help diagnose solid cancer or accurately predict the prognosis of solid cancer patients. Compared to biopsy, a highly invasive process, liquid biopsy has the advantage of being able to analyze circulating tumor cells with just the cancer patients' blood alone.
 
Professor Sunghoon Kwon and his team succeeded in applying the Next Generation Sequencing engineering technique into the circulating tumor cell separation technology. Since its development in 2006, NGS is a technology that has been used in the diagnosis and prescription of diseases in not just biological research areas like biotechnology, medicine and pharmacology but also in clinical research areas. The analysis of human genomes, which previously required astronomical costs, can now be completed under the cost of one million won through the development of NGS. Using the NGS-applied results generated by Professor Sunghoon Kwon and his team's research, it is possible for one to conduct genetic tests at an affordable price with simple blood tests, which can diagnose solid cancer or predict the prognosis of cancer patients. The team led by Professor Wonshik Han of SNU Hospital linked solid cancer-related information derived from a single circulating tumor cell to already analyzed circulating tumor cells to test the medical applicability of the technology.
 
The results of the study, involving the multidisciplinary collaboration between SNU College of Engineering, SNU Hospital and various other institutions, was published in the August front cover of “Small”, a world-renowned academic journal. The research was conducted with the support of the Ministry of Science and ICT (Pioneer Research Center Program, Global Research and Development Center), and the Ministry of Education (BK 21 Plus Project). Led by Professor Sunghoon Kwon of SNU Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the first author Dr. Okju Kim (Celemics, Inc.), Dr. Daewon Lee (SNU College of Engineering), Research Worker Chungwon Lee (SNU College of Engineering), Professor Han-Byoel Lee (SNU Hospital) and Professor Wonshik Han (SNU Hospital), took part in the research.