"This work fits well into our bigger vision of using blood-based diagnostics to detect and manage disease, including cancer," said Sanjiv "Sam" Gambhir, professor and chair of radiology. "By being able to characterize single CTCs, we believe cancer management, including predicting response to therapy, will be much better optimized."
The blood typically contains very few CTCs, so one of the challenges has been to separate them from ordinary blood cells. The new technique involves taking blood from lung cancer patients and then attaching antibodies to circulating tumor cells. Once the cancer cells are labeled, the team introduces magnetic nanoparticles designed to attach to the antibodies labeling the cancer cells.
With each individual cancer cell labeled with a magnetic nanoparticle, the researchers can then use a device called a magnetic sifter, or MagSifter, previously developed by Shan Wang, Stanford professor of materials science and engineering and of electrical engineering.
When the MagSifter is on, it pulls the nanoparticle-labeled CTCs from the blood sample and allows the rest of the blood to flow through the sifter. The CTCs pulled from the blood are then deposited into a flat array of tiny wells, each large enough for only one cell. Now the tumor cells are ready for genetic analysis.
In principle, the technique should work just as well with other kinds of cancers, said former Stanford graduate students Dawson Wong. "We validated our device on lung cancer because of the difficulties of doing lung biopsies," he was quoted as saying in a news release. "But the technology is not limited to profiling lung cancer. We could swap out markers and adapt the technique to other types of cancers."
【国际英语资讯:Blood test holds promise for cheaper, better way for managing lung cancer】相关文章:
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2020-09-15
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