Nano materials aid early cancer detection
Wickstrom's early cancer detection system causes cancerous cells to light up like a filament in a light bulb. The system is also portable. If successful, it might also be used in remote villages, or at the South Pole, or on the space shuttle.
DB: This is Earth & Sky. The earlier a doctor can detect a patient’s cancer, the better the chances of treating it.
JB: Unfortunately, conventional blood tests only detect cancer when there are many cancer cells in the blood. Eric Wickstrom at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia wants a system that’ll detect just a few cancer cells in blood.
Eric Wickstrom: It would be very helpful because it could be a very early warning before the patient starts to feel bad. There are many cancers that don’t make you feel bad until it’s already too late.
DB: Wickstrom’s team has created a new material shown to detect just a few cancer cells, in a water solution used for testing. The material contains carbon nanotubes—fibers of carbon only a few atoms wide—plus substances called antibodies that stick only to cancer cells. When the new material touches a cancer cell, electricity flows. In other words, the cancer cell acts like a light bulb, and the new material acts like a light socket.
Eric Wickstrom: If you don’t have a light bulb in a light socket, you aren’t going to see any light and there’s no electricity flowing through that system. If you put a light bulb in the socket, suddenly there’s something that the electricity can go through like the filament in the light bulb and you see this bright light come on.
JB: Wickstrom’s team now plans to test the system with human blood. That’s our show. With thanks to the National Science Foundation, we’re Block and Byrd for Earth & Sky.
One challenge with this system is that the antibodies used to detect cancer cells are usually specific to certain kinds of cancer. So it may not be possible to design a system that detects all possible cancers. Instead, the system might be designed to only detect certain cancers that the patient might be most likely to have.
Wickstrom says this kind of system could be added to the list of things a doctor tests for during routine annual blood tests, which might already measure things such as blood sugar, cholesterol and blood pressure. The test might also be useful for someone who has had cancer before, has received treatment and needs to know if it’s returned.
Wickstrom now plans to test the device with expired human blood. If it works, he hopes to have clinical trials with fresh human blood in two or three years.
Our thanks to:
Eric Wickstrom
1) Professor of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology
2) Professor of Microbiology & Immunology
Jefferson Medical College
Thomas Jefferson University
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
