New Scientist
Image: jfeuchter
Cancer cells might evade the body’s defences, but dodging DNA tentacles is another matter. A jellyfish-inspired device might make it easier to diagnose cancer in its early stages.
When people with conditions like leukaemia are in remission, it’s important to establish as early as possible if their cancer has returned.
Finding out involves passing a sample of blood through a microfluidic device, in whose tiny channels cancer cells can be captured and identified. However, this only works well if blood passes through extremely slowly, so that any cancer cells bump into the channels’ sides, which are lined with adhesives designed to trap specific cells. This is highly time-consuming, and the method can also fail to spot cells at the early stages of cancer, when numbers are very low.
So Jeffrey Karp at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts, together with Weian Zhao at the University of California, Irvine, and Rohit Karnik at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have devised a better method – by following the lead of jellyfish. “We thought it would be incredibly useful if we could mimic jellyfish and functionalise microfluidic devices with long tentacles,” says Karp. Read more on newscientist.com…
