Supersensitive Nanodevice Could Detect Cancer Earlier
By Chuck Seegert, Ph.D.
Researchers at the University of Alabama at Huntsville (UAH) have developed a nanodevice that senses extremely low levels of cancer biomarkers. The advance may allow earlier detection of disease and be broadly applicable to many different disease biomarkers.
Early detection of cancers allows treatment to begin at a much earlier stage in the disease process. Starting treatment earlier in tumor development has been shown to be a strong indicator of treatment success. Upon formation, many cancers will produce characteristic cell products that are indicative of their level of growth. An example is prostate specific antigen (PSA), a biomarker for prostate enlargement and tumor growth. Finding biomarkers like PSA allows routine screening in high risk populations, which can head cancer off at the pass.
When tumors are smaller, they produce a lower concentration of biomarkers, which makes the latest advance from UAH significant. The system has been designed to test for IL-6, a prevalent cancer biomarker, according to a recent press release.
"If you have a cancer, then your basic level of IL-6 will increase," said Dr. Yongbin Lin, a research scientist at UAH's Nano and Micro Devices Center, in the press release. "A lot of cancers have links to IL-6."
With future development, the team expects to reduce the device to a lunchbox-size unit that can be used at the point of care for immediate results, according to the press release.
The core technology at work is surface plasmon resonance with a fiber optic nanoprobe, according to a recent study published by the team in Science Direct. For development purposes, the device was optimized to identify PSA levels, and it was capable of detecting concentrations as low as 3 femtomolar. Using a control protein of bovine serum albumin (5mg/ml), the team also demonstrated that the sensitivity was very selective and only reacted with PSA.
The binding of the PSA molecules to the sensor is mediated by antibodies specific to PSA. This is not a requirement, however, as antibodies could be created for a host of biomarkers including Ebola.
"This could work in that situation,” Dr. Lin said in the press release. “We'd just have to find a specific antigen for that virus.”
Rapid and sensitive biomarker tests are continually being developed in the medical device field. Advances in graphene materials science recently allowed detection of another cancer biomarker at a more sensitive level.
Image Credit: Michael Mercier | UAH