MinION Enabled MicroRNA Quantification Services

The Yenos tests:
(a) are the only multi-cancer, multi-disease tests that can be performed using a urine sample, making them truly non-invasive.
(b) do not sequence your DNA/RNA, while other multi-cancer tests do.
(c) measure the levels of microRNAs, but microRNAs are ubiquitous, and they cannot be used to profile an individual.

The science behind the Yenos’ Multi-Cancer, Multi-Disease Early Detection tests is based on the overexpression of selected microRNAs in biological fluids at the onset of a disease, including cancers. Since 2001, when Victor Ambros (References 1,2) proposed that microRNAs regulate the posttranscriptional expression of messenger RNAs and proteins, over 150,000 peer-reviewed medical studies have identified selected microRNAs as biomarkers for cancer and other diseases.

Technologies employed for microRNA quantification from blood or other biological fluids exploit transcription to DNA followed by PCR amplification, a process with known quantification issues for short RNAs, such as the 22 nucleotide long microRNAs. Other technologies use microarrays with questionable hybridization efficiency. These deficiencies inspired us to develop a novel nanopore-array-based sensing assay that directly measures microRNA copies from biological fluids, i.e., the Yenos Tests.

The Yenos technology was first described in 2020 (Reference 3) and recently patented (Reference 4). The first step entails the isolation of total RNA, including microRNAs, from serum or urine using commercial RNA isolation kits. The second step includes the hybridization of a few microliters of the RNA isolate with a Yenos proprietary probe, complementary to the microRNA target, and the third step detection via a single-molecule ion-conductance nanopore experiment using the MinION device from Oxford Nanopore Technologies and our own patented protocol (see video of an experiment).

Our own studies using known microRNA cancer biomarkers miR-141 (Ref. 2), miR-375 and miR-21 (Ref. 5) with blood and urine samples from healthy individuals, as well as from newly diagnosed patients with breast, ovarian, prostate, pancreatic, lung and colorectal cancers show clear discrimination and zero data overlap between cancer and healthy samples (Ref. 6-8). Considering that microRNA dysregulation identifies the onset of cancer, our technology may be the only one to detect multiple cancers at the earliest stage, and ahead of tumor formation.