In the fight against cancer, knowing the enemy’s exact
identity is crucial for diagnosis and treatment, especially in metastatic
cancers, those that spread between organs and tissues. Now chemists led by
Vincent Rotello at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have developed a
rapid, sensitive way to detect microscopic levels of many different metastatic
cell types in living tissue. Findings appear in the current issue of the
journal ACS Nano.
In a pre-clinical non-small-cell lung cancer metastasis
model in mice developed by Frank Jirik and colleagues at the University of
Calgary, Rotello’s team at UMass Amherst use a sensor array system of gold
nanoparticles and proteins to “smell” different cancer types in much the same
way our noses identify and remember different odors. The new work builds on
Rotello and colleagues’ earlier development of a “chemical nose” array of
nanoparticles and polymers able to differentiate between normal cells and
cancerous ones.