USF researchers awarded $2 million to create device for simplifying DNA damage testing

Dr. Marcus Cooke, professor and chair of the USF College of Arts and Sciences Department of Molecular Biosciences, has been awarded a $2 million grant from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences to develop a novel device for automating the comet assay - essentially making it easier and faster to test cells for DNA damage.

"DNA damage, caused by environmental agents and the body's normal processes, plays a critical role in the development of many major human diseases," says Cooke, who is serving as principal investigator. "In the U.S. alone, this potentially impacts one in two adults, about 125 million people. While the comet assay is one of the most widely used and versatile methods for detecting cellular DNA damage, it is a time-consuming and labor-intensive method."

Cooke and his colleagues have their sights set on creating a device to simplify this process, thus helping researchers better understand how DNA damage affects health and disease, leading to better prevention and treatment strategies.
Their device, called the Automated High Through-Put Comet Assay Device, will cut back on the time-consuming testing processes used to determine DNA damage.

"Each test within the assay needs to be manipulated, by hand, through many reagents and conditions, making it time and labor intensive. Our device has taken a procedure that takes 1 to 2 days and slimmed it down to about 5 hours. Plus, it works unsupervised. Press the start button and come back later," he added.

This current leg of the research, which began in August 2024 and will run through August 2026, is part of a longer research effort and has already seen several breakthroughs, all of which Cooke says are protected by patents.

"The first was in 2013 when I discovered we could perform the comet assay with the tests held vertically, instead of horizontally. This decreased the footprint of the assay and increased throughput. It was a bit of a eureka moment," he said. "Then, I proposed that we keep the tests static and add to them the reagents and processes, rather than the other way around. These two ideas combined led directly to the development of the current device."

Cooke says the goal of the project is to produce a commercialization-ready device, which will uniquely address the unmet need of providing users with a standalone, automated analysis of DNA damage.

"The device will be sufficiently developed for demonstration to potential commercial partners," he said. "As a parallel arm of this project, we have had an inquiry from a company that is developing a patented cancer detection test. They need automation to get this into clinical labs as a routine test and wish to work with us to achieve this."

Not only will this new device improve outcomes for patients and people at risk of diseases, but it will also benefit the process of creating life-saving drugs and accelerate discovery, according to Cooke, as any new agents produced by the pharmaceutical industry must undergo the test Cooke and his team's device automates.

"DNA damage is a crucial endpoint in many experiments, and new drugs need to be assessed for their safety," he explained. "Often, not causing DNA damage is a sign of safety, but sometimes we want some drugs (such as anti-cancer drugs) to cause DNA damage. Being able to assess both is critical to the pharmaceutical industry. DNA damage is also a frequent consequence of environmental, drug, chemical, and dietary exposures. Assessing these simply and quickly will improve our understanding how we are exposed to disease risk factors and what we can do to mitigate this."