Your Pap Dollars at Work
Revolutionary Cancer Research at Sylvester using Nanotechnology
Your Pap Dollars at Work!
Revolutionary Cancer Research at Sylvester Using Nanotechnology…
Nanotechnology is the engineering of functional systems at the molecular scale. Nanotechnology is especially important to medicine because the medical field deals with things on the smallest of levels – molecules. Led by Richard J. Cote, M.D., scientists and physicians at Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center1 at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine are involved in the development of a blood microfilter, a micro device that identifies the earliest signs of metastasis of cancer, by detecting the circulating tumor cells (CTC). It could also be used to monitor the efficiency of a cancer therapy, giving doctors information that could transform the way a person’s cancer is diagnosed and treated.
Determining whether a cancer patient is undergoing metastasis – the spread of the disease to other organs – is a significant challenge for oncologists. There is substantial evidence suggesting that following complete surgical removal of a tumor, CTCs shed from the cancer tissue can be present in the blood of patients who other-wise show no overt evidence of metastasis. It is for this reason that cancer patients often receive follow-up chemotherapy. Recent studies have shown that CTCs also can be used to predict the effectiveness of the therapy provided. That is why the microfilter, an efficient and sensitive method of filtering out and analyzing CTCs in the patient’s blood, is so important.
Since tumor cells are larger than normal blood cells, the novel microfilter not only captures the circulating tumor cells in less than 2 minutes for each 10 mililiter blood sample, but it also characterizes these cells at the molecular level using nanoscale crystals called quantum dots. The microfilter separates the larger cancer cells from the smaller normal blood cells, and provides a simple diagnostic test that applies to most
carcinomas, the bulk of human cancers. The captured CTCs can be detected and analyzed directly on the microfilter device, and thus provide clinicians with an efficient, simple and reliable method of cancer identification. The device is faster, more efficient and potentially a lot less expensive than any other known method. In addition, it can be used for virtually every type of solid tumor.
Because the device is portable, and the assessment has a rapid turn-around time, it is easily conceivable that multiple “liquid (blood) biopsies” can be conducted in a patient-friendly manner, resulting in fewer invasive and painful tissue biopsies.
Looking to the Future
Ongoing studies will be testing blood samples from 250 patients enrolled in a multi-site clinical trial examining a novel prostate cancer therapy. Proposals also are underway to test its use in many other studies including breast, pancreatic, colorectal and bladder cancers. Sylvester researchers are currently involved in exploring ways to mass produce the disposable microfilters at a low cost. They also are working to develop a next generation microfilter that will include a drug-sensitivity analysis platform. This would provide a “companion diagnostic” tool for the pharmaceutical industry, allowing it to expedite development of newer drugs tailored to the molecular make-up of an individual patient’s CTC. And eventually, because this information can identify newer targets on tumor cells for chemotherapy, treatment could be delivered to malignancies without harming the surrounding healthy cells.
1Richard J. Cote, M.D., professor and chair of pathology and the Director of Biomedical Nanoscience Institute at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, and Ram Datar, Ph.D., associate professor of pathology and the Co-Director of Biomedical Nanoscience Institute at the University of Miami, in collaboration with Yu-Chong Tai, Ph.D., professor of electrical engineering at the California Institute of Technology.
