Sydney: Researchers at the University of Technology Sydney have created a novel tool that allows doctors to skip invasive procedures biopsy operations and track the effectiveness of treatment by detecting and analyzing cancer cells from blood samples.
More than 150,000 Australians are diagnosed with cancer each year, making it one of the leading causes of illness and death in the country. Surgery is often required for a conclusive diagnosis in those suspected of having cancer, especially when the cancer is in an organ such as the liver, colon, or kidney.
Professor Majid Warki, from the UTS School of Biomedical Engineering, said having a biopsy can cause discomfort for patients, as well as a higher risk of complications due to surgery and higher costs, but an accurate cancer diagnosis is vital. for effective treatment.
“Cancer management through the evaluation of tumor cells on blood samples is much less invasive than taking tissue biopsies. It allows doctors to repeat the tests and monitor the patient’s response to treatment,” she said.
The Static Droplet Microfluidic device is capable of rapidly detecting circulating tumor cells that have broken away from a primary tumor and entered the bloodstream.
The device uses a unique metabolic signature of cancer to differentiate tumor cells from normal blood cells.
The study, Rapid Metabolomic Screening of cancer cells via high-performance static droplet microfluidics, has just been published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal, Biosensors and Bioelectronics.
“In the 1920s, Otto Warburg discovered that cancer cells consume a lot of glucose and therefore produce more lactate. Our device monitors individual cells for increased lactate using pH-sensitive fluorescent dyes that detect acidification around cells,” said Professor Warkiani.
“A single tumor cell can exist among billions of blood cells in a single milliliter of blood, so it is very difficult to find. The new detection technology has 38,400 cameras capable of isolating and classifying the number of metabolically active tumor cells,” he said.
Once tumor cells are identified with the device, they can undergo genetic and molecular analysis, which can aid in the diagnosis and classification of cancer and inform personalized treatment plans.
Circulating tumor cells are also precursors of metastasis – where cancer migrates to distant organs – which is the cause of 90 percent of cancer-associated deaths. Studying these cells may provide insight into the biology of cancer metastasis, which may inform the development of new treatments.
Existing liquid biopsy technologies are time consuming, expensive, and dependent on skilled operators, limiting their application in clinical settings.
This new technology is designed to be integrated into clinical and research laboratories without relying on high-end equipment and trained operators. This will allow doctors to diagnose and monitor cancer patients in a convenient and cost-effective manner.
The UTS research team has filed a provisional patent for the Static Droplet Microfluidic device and has plans to commercialize the product.
