Surgical removal of a tissue sample is now the standard for diagnosing cancer. Such procedures, known as biopsies, are accurate but offer only a snapshot of the tumor at a single moment in time.
Monitoring a tumor for weeks or months after the biopsy and tracking its growth and how it responds to treatment would be much more valuable, says Michael J. Cima, Ph.D., who has developed the first implantable device that can do just that. Dr. Cima, professor of materials science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a member of the MIT-Harvard Center of Cancer Nanotechnology Excellence (CCNE), and his colleagues reported in the journal Biosensors and Bioelectronics that their device successfully tracked a tumor marker in mice for 1 month. Fellow MIT CCNE investigators Robert Langer, Ph.D., Al Charest, Ph.D., M.Sc., and Ralph Weissleder, M.D., Ph.D., also contributed to this work.
Such implants could one day provide up-to-the-minute information about what a tumor is doing-whether it is growing or shrinking, how it is responding to treatment, and whether it has metastasized or is about to do so. "What this does is basically take the lab and put it in the patient," said Dr. Cima.
The devices, which could be implanted at the time of biopsy, also could be tailored to monitor chemotherapy agents, allowing doctors to determine whether cancer drugs are reaching the tumors. They also can be designed to measure acidity (pH) or oxygen levels, which reveal tumor metabolism and how it is responding to therapy.