(June 5, 2015) Two
young researchers working at the MIPT Laboratory of Nanooptics and Plasmonics,
Dmitry Fedyanin and Yury Stebunov, have developed an ultracompact highly
sensitive nanomechanical sensor for analyzing the chemical composition of
substances and detecting biological objects, such as viral disease markers,
which appear when the immune system responds to incurable or hard-to-cure
diseases, including HIV, hepatitis, herpes, and many others. The sensor will
enable doctors to identify tumor markers, whose presence in the body signals
the emergence and growth of cancerous tumors.
The sensitivity of the new device is best characterized by
one key feature: according to its developers, the sensor can track changes of
just a few kilodaltons in the mass of a cantilever in real time. One Dalton is
roughly the mass of a proton or neutron, and several thousand Daltons are the
mass of individual proteins and DNA molecules. So the new optical sensor will
allow for diagnosing diseases long before they can be detected by any other
method, which will pave the way for a new-generation of diagnostics.