Device can spot cancer cells in blood

Device can spot cancer cells in blood
Microchip could help doctors tailor patient treatment, researchers say
Reuters
updated 12:46 p.m. PT, Wed., Dec. 19, 2007

CHICAGO - A highly sensitive microchip may help doctors detect rare
traces of cancer circulating in the bloodstream, offering a way to
better manage treatment, U.S. researchers said on Wednesday.

The device can isolate, count and analyze circulating tumor cells from
a blood sample, the team at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard
Medical School in Boston said.

These circulating tumor cells, or CTCs, are the tiniest fragments of
tumors, which are carried in the blood.

Doctors have known about them for some time, but because they are so
rare and so fragile, they have been hard to trap and study in a
meaningful way.

"What our technology does is increase the sensitivity many, many fold,
to a point where it can become a tool that can be used clinically,"
said Mehmet Toner, whose group developed the device.

He said routine monitoring of these cells could help doctors tailor
treatments to patients and may one day aid with diagnosis.

"Nine out 10 deaths in cancer are due to the metastatic process
because the cancer spreads to other parts of the body," said Toner,
whose study appears in the journal Nature.

"These are really the cells that end up killing people."

Current blood tests to detect these rare cells involved many steps of
mixing and spinning and shaking, often killing what few cells they
found.

"We went to the blackboard and designed it from scratch," Toner said
in a telephone interview.

Trapping cancer cells
The device they made uses a business-card sized silicon chip. It has
microscopic posts that are coated with antibodies that recognize
cancer cells.

As blood flows over the chip, these posts act like glue, trapping
cancer cells and leaving blood cells behind.

Older methods may have produced one to five cells out of 60 billion
cells screened in an 8-milliliter tube of blood. The new device can
find 1,000 cancer cells.

The researchers tested their chip against blood samples from 68
patients with five types of tumors -- lung, prostate, breast,
pancreatic and colorectal.

Out of 116 samples, they found circulating tumor cells in all but one
sample, and none were found in samples taken from healthy people.


And the test was sensitive enough to detect changes in circulating
tumor cell levels during treatment, with drops in detected CTC levels
matching tumor shrinkage seen on standard CT scans.

"Suddenly, we have a great opportunity to have an impact in cancer in
major ways," Toner said.

He said the technology will allow for much more personalized cancer
care. "You get a sense of how a patient is responding to treatment."

Eventually, it also may prove useful for cancer screening. And ready
access to live cancer cells will advance cancer research.

"We will start to understand the biology of cancer much better," Toner
said.

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22330136/


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