A team led by University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) researchers on the cutting edge of nanotechnology has found a way to capture tumor cells in the bloodstream that could dramatically improve earlier cancer diagnosis and prevent deadly metastasis.
The discovery was published Nov. 15 in Nature Nanotechnology, a prestigious monthly print and online journal that provides a forum for leading research papers in all areas of nanoscience and nanotechnology. To read the abstract, visit http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nnano.2009.333.html.
Vladimir Zharov, director of the Phillips Classic Laser and Nanomedicine Laboratory at UAMS, said his team of researchers can inject a cocktail of magnetic and gold nanoparticles with a special biological coating into the bloodstream to target circulating tumor cells. A magnet attached to the skin above peripheral blood vessels can then capture the cells.
"By magnetically collecting most of the tumor cells from blood circulating in vessels throughout the whole body, this new method can potentially increase specificity and sensitivity up to 1,000 times compared to existing technology," Zharov said.
Once the tumor cells are targeted and captured by the magnet, they can either be microsurgically removed from vessels for further genetic analysis or can be noninvasively eradicated directly in blood vessels by laser irradiation through the skin that is still safe for normal blood cells.
Zharov's team, which has recently been awarded more than $3.7 million in clinical nanomedicine-related grants, includes Ekaterina Galanzha, M.D., Ph.D., an assistant professor in the UAMS Department of Otolaryngology; Evgeny Shashkov, Ph.D., a visiting scholar and laser physicist; Thomas Kelly, Ph.D., associate professor in the UAMS Department of Pathology; Jin-Woo Kim, Ph.D., a nano-biotechnologist at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville; and Lily Yang, Ph.D., a biologist from Emory University.
A second related discovery by Zharov's team was published in Cancer Research in October. It demonstrated that periodic laser irradiation of blood vessels decreases the level of circulating metastatic tumor cells more than 10 times and eventually led to an interruption of metastasis development in distant organs. To read the abstract, visit http://cancerres.aacrjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/69/20/7926?etoc.