Bioengineering researchers working at the Georgia Institute of Technology have revealed their discovery of a novel detection technique that would provide valuable cancer information to make its treatment more effective.
The Making of the Microchip. Credit: Georgia Institute of Technology
The team’s new chip or method, which was reported in Nature Communications, would make it possible to know how cancers metastasize. It can also reveal the stage of cancer.
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Typically, cancer spreads to different organs and parts of the body with the aid of circulating tumor cells. A tumor releases its cell into the blood when it begins to metastasize. It is usually hard for a single cell to survive in the bloodstream, but the case is different when cells are in clusters.
Cell clusters are a lot tougher and can reach other organs in the body more successfully. As a result, they can make cancers fully metastatic.
CTCs are very difficult – almost impossible – to pin down. Researchers have, therefore, found them quite hard to study.
With this novel detection method, CTCs should be easier to study. This may enable timelier discovery and more effective treatment of cancers.
Chip for studying cell clusters
There are billions of cells per millimeter of blood but only a small amount would be CTCs in metastatic cancer patients, according to researchers. Most conventional filtration techniques make it difficult to study the effects of clusters in that they break them up into lone cells due to their aggressive nature.
“That’s what got engineers like me interested in this because we are really good at creating sensors, or small devices that actually do sensitive analysis,” said Dr. Fatih Sarioglu, an associate professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech. “We started developing technologies to catch these precious cells to help manage cancer better.”
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Sarioglu’s lab, therefore, created what is called the Cluster-Well chip for enhanced detection of CTC clusters. This brings microfluidic chips’ precision and membrane filtration’s efficiency together in one.
The microfluidic chips can accurately detect every single cell in a blood sample and check whether it is cancerous. Membrane filtration enhances the scalability of the chip by swiftly processing a volume of blood that is clinically significant.
What the new chip promises to make possible isn’t the only thing that makes it exciting. It is also inexpensive and accessible without sacrificing precision or sensitivity.
Putting the chip to test
The research team went further to screen blood samples from people with ovarian or prostate cancer using the chip, in collaboration with Emory and Northside Hospitals. It successfully isolated CTC clusters that had two to 100 cells, or higher, in these patients.
A subset of the samples was evaluated with RNA sequencing.
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The design of the chip enables the filtering of CTC clusters in microwells, thus making it possible to access them at a later time for extra analysis.
Researchers noted that a solitary CTC can provide a large amount of information about a patient and their cancer. They observed CTCs in their hundreds in clusters found in the blood of patients with ovarian cancer and some of these were still alive.
The team successfully detected the expression of specific genes through the RNA sequencing of prostate CTC clusters that the chip isolated.
Of particular importance was a discovery that clusters from different patients expressed distinct genes. This finding could be used to create better targeted, personalized treatments for patients.
Sarioglu expects the Cluster-Well chip to become a key part of the cancer treatment process. It will help to more easily discern the stage of cancer.
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References
High throughput, label-free isolation of circulating tumor cell clusters in meshed microwells
New Chip Could Make Treating Metastatic Cancer Easier and Faster
