CANCER MONITORING

Oct. 2009
A microfluidics chip that can easily detect estrogen levels in breast cancer patients could give physicians a new way to monitor the disease. The chip, developed by scientists at the University of Toronto, uses electrical signals to move droplets of fluids around a microfluidics circuit, and it requires a blood or tissue sample 1,000 times smaller than that required by current methods. [5]

Feb. 2010
Jae Wan Kwon's group is developing an acoustic resonant sensor smaller than a human hair to test bodily fluids for a variety of diseases, including breast and prostate cancers. The real-time sensor uses micro- and nano-electromechanical systems (M/NEMS) to detect diseases in bodily fluids, and can be integrated with small circuits instead of bulky data-reading and analyzing equipment. [4]

The Tyndall National Institute,in Cork, Ireland has come up with a radiation detector that fits inside an implantable medical device that measures how well radiation therapy is working. The FDA approved the use of the DVS (Dose Verification System) from North Carolina's Sicel Technologies. The DVS collects information about patients and then transmits the data to an outside system. It also gets its power externally via its antenna. The device is designed to last as long as the treatment. Sicel also makes an external version that is applied to the skin, called OneDose, that measures radiation from the most immediate dose of radiation. [1]

Monitoring a tumor for weeks or months after the biopsy, tracking its growth, and studying how it responds to treatment would be much more valuable, says Michael Cima, professor of materials science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who has developed the first implantable device to do just that. "What this does is basically take the lab and put it in the patient. The devices, which are designed to be implanted at the time of biopsy, could be tailored to monitor chemotherapy agents, allowing doctors to determine whether cancer drugs are reaching the tumors [2]

vacances
Now researchers are building an electronic nose that could help physicians detect the disease during its initial stages. Using gold nanoparticles, scientists at the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa have created sensors with an unprecedented sensitivity for sniffing out compounds present in the breath of lung-cancer patients.
The chemicals, called volatile organic compounds (VOCs), are metabolic products present in the vapors that we breathe out, but they occur in such small amounts that researchers have had to find ways to increase their concentrations before testing. Now, Hossam Haick and his colleagues have built sensors using an array of gold nanoparticles that can detect these VOCs in their natural concentrations and under the humid conditions characteristic of human breath. [3]