3D Hydrogel Biochips Aid In Early Detection Of Bowel Cancer
Early detection is paramount to survival from bowel cancer, but doing so is difficult because most symptoms don’t present until the cancer matures. Worse, existing diagnostic tests tend to be invasive and traumatic. Russian scientists hope to change this with a new biochip technology that can gather better, more precise data for diagnostic analysis. The scientists report that their new method far outstrips traditional methods of diagnosing bowel cancer.
Bowel cancer which is also known as the colorectal cancer is the third most common cancer in the world. It is treatable but survival rates drop dramatically with each stage of the disease. The method proposed by scientists from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT), the Engelhardt Institute of Molecular Biology (EIMB RAS) and colleagues is based on the simultaneous detection of various substances in patients’ blood.
In an effort to improve the chances of early diagnosis, researchers created 3D (hemispherical) hydrogel-based biochips which detect autoantibodies. Autoantibodies are antibodies produced by the immune system. The researchers were interested in autoantibodies against tumor-associated glycans, which are sugary compounds like chitin and cellulose. Cancerous glycans spread the disease and are essential for
building and maintaining cells as well as enabling communication between cells.3D cells are made of a special gel that contains molecular probes needed to gather data from blood serum. The 3D structure of biochip aids in equal distribution of probes and help in getting an accurate reading.
They tested their system on the sera of 129 people, 33 patients with colorectal cancer, 27 with inflammatory bowel disease, and the rest healthy donors. The biochip method was able to diagnose colorectal cancer in 95 percent of cases, compared to 79 percent with traditional methods. And it had a sensitivity reading of 88 percent versus just 21 percent for detecting the cancer in stage II or later patients (which means it more accurately determined who still had the cancer).
The scientists hope this new screening and early detection method could provide a more reliable and cheaper alternative than existing techniques such as colonoscopy, which lean more into cancer prevention than cancer detection and which are also more invasive than the biochip method.
They now plan to verify their findings with further investigation. A paper describing the study was published in the journal Cancer Medicine.
