Stanford chemists develop `ultra-sensitive test' for cancers
Malathy Iyer | TNN | Mar 24, 2016, 03.11 AM IST
Coming, super sensitive test to detect cancers, HIV (Getty Images)
It
is usually said that early detection of cancer could lead to effective
treatment, but a lot depends on the patient undergoing screening at the
right time.
If a new method developed by Stanford University researchers clicks in a soon-to-be launched clinical trial, tests will soon become more sensitive in picking up cancer cells than existing tests.
"When a disease - whether a cancer or a virus like HIV - begins growing in the body, the immune system responds by producing antibodies. Fishing these antibodies or related biomarkers out of the blood is one way that scientists infer the presence of a disease. This involves designing a molecule that the biomarker will bind to, and which is adorned with an identifying "flag." Through a series of specialized chemical reactions, known as an immunoassay, researchers can isolate that flag, and the biomarker bound to it, to provide a proxy measurement of the disease," said a press release sent out by the university.
If a new method developed by Stanford University researchers clicks in a soon-to-be launched clinical trial, tests will soon become more sensitive in picking up cancer cells than existing tests.
"When a disease - whether a cancer or a virus like HIV - begins growing in the body, the immune system responds by producing antibodies. Fishing these antibodies or related biomarkers out of the blood is one way that scientists infer the presence of a disease. This involves designing a molecule that the biomarker will bind to, and which is adorned with an identifying "flag." Through a series of specialized chemical reactions, known as an immunoassay, researchers can isolate that flag, and the biomarker bound to it, to provide a proxy measurement of the disease," said a press release sent out by the university.
Latest Comment
Cancer vaccine?The new technique, developed in the lab of Carolyn Bertozzi, a professor of chemistry at Stanford, augments this standard procedure with powerful DNA screening technology. The scientists replaced the standard flag with a short strand of DNA, which can then be teased out of the sample using DNA isolation technologies that are far more sensitive than those possible for traditional antibody detections. ``The researchers tested their technique, with its signature DNA flag, against four commercially available, FDA-approved tests for a biomarker for thyroid cancer. It outperformed the sensitivity of all of them, by at least 800 times, and as much as 10,000 times. By detecting the biomarkers of disease at lower concentrations, physicians could theoretically catch diseases far earlier in their progression,'' it added.
Co-author Peter Robinson has been quoted as saying, "The thyroid cancer test has historically been a fairly challenging immunoassay, because it produces a lot of false positives and false negatives, so it wasn't clear if our test would have an advantage." He added that while the group hoped their test would be more sensitive, they were ``pleasantly surprised'' by the magnitude.
No comments:
Post a Comment