IRIC - Institute for Research in Immunology and Cancer

Published on September 11, 2025

Delphine Bouilly’s team, in collaboration with Sylvie Mader and Sébastien Lemieux, has been awarded major funding from the Government of Canada’s New Frontiers in Research Fund – Exploration Stream, for her project “Exploiting Electrolytic Gating in Graphene Field-Effect Nanosensors to Achieve Multiplexed Breast Cancer Profiling for Personalized Medicine”.

The $250,000 in funding will enable IRIC scientists and their external collaborators to develop a new graphene biosensor, a thin nanomaterial whose electrical conductance responds directly to the capture of specific molecules. This tool will target the screening of several mutations in liquid biopsies from breast cancer patients.

The development of such a technology could have a transformative impact not only for breast cancer, currently the most common cancer in Canada, but more generally in medical oncology and other diagnostic fields.

The teams’ transdisciplinary approach will uniquely combine device engineering, molecular simulations, artificial intelligence and bioassay design.

This funding underlines the excellence of the work done by IRIC laboratories and their partners, and the real potential of this electronic tool for concrete medical applications.

Congratulations to the teams involved in this promising project!