Mind, Body, Spirit
11 Dec 2007 | : *News*
‘Poke’ test may diagnose cancer
03 Dec 2007 | : *News*
TheStar.com
- Health -
‘Poke’ test may help diagnose cancer
Study finds malignant cells softer than healthy ones, like rotten fruit
December 03, 2007
Will Dunham
REUTERS NEWS AGENCY
WASHINGTON–Cancer cells, like ripe fruit, are much softer than healthy cells, scientists said yesterday in a finding that could help doctors diagnose tumours and figure out which might be the deadliest.
The researchers used a nanotechnology device called an Atomic Force Microscope that allowed them to give a little poke to healthy cells and cancerous cells that had spread from the original site of tumours.
Cancer cells taken from people with pancreatic, breast and lung tumours were more than 70 per cent softer than benign cells, the scientists wrote in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.
“The bottom line is now we can feel the cancer cells with this technology, in addition to looking at them and analyzing them in a molecular way,” Jianyu Rao of the Jonsson Cancer Center at the University of California at Los Angeles, one of the researchers, said in a telephone interview.
“We think it may be diagnostically helpful.”
The different types of cancer cells examined in the study exhibited similar levels of softness, allowing the healthy and diseased ones to be clearly identified.
The technique may represent a new method for detecting cancer, particularly in cells from body cavity fluids for which diagnosis with current techniques can be difficult, the researchers said.
Conventional diagnostic methods miss about 30 per cent of cases in which cancer cells are present in this fluid, the researchers said.
The microscope used in the study has a small tip on a spring to push against a cell’s surface and determine its softness or firmness.
“You look at two tomatoes in the supermarket and both are red. One is rotten, but it looks normal,” UCLA chemistry professor James Gimzewski, another of the researchers, said in a statement.
“If you pick up the tomatoes and feel them, it’s easy to figure out which one is rotten. We’re doing the same thing. We’re poking and
quantitatively measuring the softness of the cells.”
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