If you have ever been one of the unlucky ones waiting for a cancer diagnosis biopsy, or having a friend or a relative undergoing the process, then you must know how the wait is nerve wrecking. The standard procedure is using a biopsy needle to extract some cells of the tissue suspected for cancer, and then waiting for about a week, until the results come out. To make matters worse, results can sometimes be inconclusive or 100% correct.

Simple smartphone applications might be able to rapidly diagnose cancer in the future

Fortunately, a group of scientists at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in Boston, were able to develop a new technology, that is much more rapid and almost 100% accurate in the diagnosis process. They developed a small NMR device (detects compounds by the mode of oscillation of their nuclei in a magnetic field) the size of about a coffee cup, and they were also able to synthesize magnetic Nanoparticles, which stick to certain tumor specific proteins. So now all I have to do, is head to the clinic, have the needle biopsy performed and the cells taken. Then they are mixed with the magnetic Nanoparticles and the results are taken from the small NMR device and read using a simple smartphone application.

This technique was used in the first trial on 50 patients, taking less than an hour to diagnose each. Also, as the device can detect 9 tumor associated proteins, combining the results for 4 of these gave accurate results in 48 out of the 50 patients. In another trial, the accuracy was 100% in the 20 patients tested. The conventional tests’ average accuracy is 74-84 %.

This new technology will also cut down on the cost of repeat biopsies, which can be very expensive, and scientists hope it will have many other applications as well, like patient cancer follow-up, through quantitative analysis of the tumor associated proteins. Maybe the biopsy will not be needed in the future and a simple blood test will also do….

Source: Science/AAAS