A nanoparticle sensor developed by Professor Sangeeta Bhatia, SM ’93, PhD ’97, and colleagues together with former MIT postdoc Liangliang Hao, now an assistant professor at Boston University, may make it potential to detect and monitor cancers with an inexpensive paper-based urine take a look at.
The nanoparticles are a variation on a kind of “synthetic biomarker” developed in Bhatia’s lab that may produce a extra simply detectable sign than the pure markers current in tiny portions in folks with most cancers. When injected particles work together with enzymes that tumor cells produce, they shed particular sequences of DNA which are excreted in urine. Using CRISPR expertise to research these DNA “bar codes” can level to distinguishing options of a specific affected person’s tumor or reveal how effectively it’s responding to therapy.
“Putting this diagnostic on paper is part of our goal of democratizing diagnostics and creating inexpensive technologies that can give you a fast answer at the point of care,” says Bhatia. In assessments in mice, the researchers confirmed that they might precisely distinguish tumors that arose within the lungs from tumors shaped by colorectal most cancers cells that had metastasized to the lungs. They additionally confirmed that their strategy might be scaled as much as distinguish no less than 46 DNA bar codes in a single pattern.