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Innovation

Using sound waves to spot cancer's spread

A device that filters tumor cells from blood using acoustic waves can determine if a cancer has metastasized. The cells remain unaltered and reusable for further examination.
Written by Janet Fang, Contributor

Scientists have designed a device that can filter cancer cells from human blood using sound. The new technology could help identify tumor cells that have spread to elsewhere in the body, New Scientist reports.

When a cancer has metastasized, tumor cells will be found in the blood. But the molecular markers that doctors use to identify those cells can actually modify them – this makes them unsuitable for studying how the treatment is proceeding and for using them in basic cancer research.

In search of an alternative, a team led by Itziar González at the Institute for Acoustics in Madrid developed a special tiny, vibrating plastic chamber.

When a sample of blood flows through the plastic chamber, the vibrations create a ‘standing wave’ (a wave that stays in a constant position) that deflects cells in the blood differently depending on their size.

Since tumor cells are usually bigger than blood cells, they collect in a different region of the device. The cells aren’t altered in the process.

Their prototype reliably differentiates cancer cells 70% of the time.

And they say that a modified version that exposes the blood to the acoustic waves for a longer amount of time should be able to differentiate a cancer cell from a normal cell 95% of the time.

That's important, González says, because identifying just two or three tumor cells in a typical 7-milliliter sample of blood is enough to determine if a cancer is metastasizing. If you miss that small number of cells because of problems with the sensitivity of a device, you won't be able to make that diagnosis, González adds.

The work was presented last month at the International Conference on Microtechnologies in Medicine and Biology in Lucerne, Switzerland.

Via New Scientist.

Image: waves via Wikimedia

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