Clinical trials

Mechanically ventilated intensive care patients will be sampled for a small amount of exhaled breath condensate from the ventilator circuit and for venous blood. Proteomic analysis of the exhaled breath condensate will be performed using mass spectrometry and in the blood sample, corresponding changes in the DNA, RNA, proteins, and metabolites will be studied. Resulting profiles will be correlated with routinely monitored parameters in order to identify patterns corresponding to various pathologies in order to enable their early detection.

Analysis of proteins from cervical mucus will be done in patients undergoing infertility treatment (fresh or frozen embryo transfer). Cervical mucus will be analysed for potential new biomarkers of endometrium receptivity. Comparison of the peptide spectrum will be done for the pregnant and not pregnant patients.

The trial will evaluate whether self-sampling and human papillomavirus (HPV) testing may increase cervical cancer screening attendance among under-screened women in Czech Republic. Different ways of offering self-sampling device will be evaluated.

Exhaled breath condensate (EBC) represents a rich source for countless biomarkers that can provide valuable information about respiratory as well as systemic diseases. Finding non-invasive methods for early detection of lung injury, inflammation and infectious complications in chronic diseases like (CF) Cystic fibrosis or (AB) Bronchial asthma would be highly beneficial. Investigators propose to establish EBC "breathprints" revealing molecular signatures of pulmonary inflammation and specific respiratory bacterial infections of CF patients and AB. Investigators hypothesize that the analysis of EBC can reveal biomarkers specific for severity of the inflammation, and infection caused by opportunistic pathogens such as P. aeruginosa (PA). With these breath-prints, investigators also propose to establish correlations between respiratory microbiota using traditional methods and CF lung disease severity. Together, the studies will advance the development and validation of EBC as a novel tool for the proper diagnosis of AB and monitoring of CF disease activity, treatment efficacy and PA or another opportunistic infections.

This study defines the prevalence of oral infection with high-risk human papillomaviruses (hrHPV) in individuals over 40 years of age in the Czech Republic. It also establishes an effective methodology for oropharyngeal carcinoma screening and optimization of screening and testing procedures.

This study will determine reference genomic, transcriptomic, proteomic and metabolomic profiles in Czech population and will evaluate its correlation with the disease phenotype.

The trial will evaluate if the newly identified biomarkers of lung cancer in exhaled breath condensate are as a diagnostic tool comparable to the low-dose computer tomography (LDCT) implemented in lung cancer screening recently. Due to the possibility to collect breath condensate at any medical workplace and due to the relatively low financial cost of examination of the collected breath condensate could improve early diagnosis of lung cancer, differential diagnostics of lung nodules and thereby reduce both the unnecessary interventions and deaths from this type of cancer.

This trial will evaluate the possible benefits and the performance of liquid biopsies in HPV-associated cancer treatment monitoring. This study aims to find a combination of an adequately sensitive and specific sampling method and biomarkers for early risk stratification of disease recurrence.

The prospective study will focus on patients undergoing multimodal treatment for rectal cancer. The main objective of the study will be to monitor changes in circulating tumor cells (CTCs) in the peripheral blood of patients during multimodal treatment. For each patient enrolled in the study, peripheral blood samples will be collected at specified time intervals to determine the presence and quantity of CTCs. The CTCs levels will be compared among rectal cancer patients with neoadjuvant chemoradiotherapy and without neoadjuvant chemotherapy.

This prospective multicenter study aims to enroll GBM patients who will undergo repeated assessments (preoperatively and 3 months post-surgery) to detect circulating tumor cells and analyze the transcriptomic profiles of EVs in their blood. The prognostic and monitoring significance of these biomarkers to disease course (assessing treatment efficacy, resistance incidence, tumor progression) will be evaluated. Concurrently, proteomic profiles typical of GBM will be analyzed in blood and ocular secretion samples from GBM patients, patients with low-grade gliomas, and patients without brain tumors to identify and validate novel protein biomarkers suitable for disease monitoring. Additionally, this study proposes an innovative approach to monitor GBM patients by investigating the presence of GBM-specific nucleic acid fragments in urine.