The project AI CUrES aims to propose novel methodologies for early diagnosis of metastasis, by gaining new knowledge at the early stage of their formation with a real-time and predictive approach.

This work has the future vision of predicting possible patient’s outcomes and helping to set timely pre-emptive therapies, empowering metastasis treatments.

In AI CUrES,  the EVs specifically produced by the primary tumor will be tagged by specific nanosized-contrast agents and their trafficking in biological media will be reported by an innovative multi-modal bioimaging technology having high resolution, deep tissue penetration, real-time and molecular characteristics. The collected images of EVs trafficking towards recipient cell (collected from in vitro cell cultures, 3D organoids and preclinical in vivo models) will be refined and further elaborated by artificial intelligence algorithms, with the aim to predict the possible metastasis development from a starting CRC tumor mass.

AI CuRES will prove the efficacy of this approach by enabling, as expected outcomes, deep scientific knowledge on metastasis formation mechanisms and demonstrating a breakthrough innovation in bioimaging technologies and digital tools for health monitoring and diagnosis of oncological patients, with a personalized approach. The results can be also useful in other tumors leading to metastasis and to empower Europe towards digital tools for predictive diagnosis.

This project has received funding from the European Research Council as an ERC-2022-PoC call with GA 101081529, title: “AI to predict Cancer metastasis using Ultra-Echo-Sono imaging”