A University of Houston researcher has developed a new method for detecting cancer that could make it as easy as taking a blood test. This method, which combines PANORAMA imaging with fluorescent imaging, has an accuracy rate of 98.7% and the potential to detect cancer at an early stage, improving the effectiveness of treatment.
Using an incredibly precise method, researchers can now look inside nanometer-sized membrane sacs known as extracellular vesicles (EVs). These EVs can transport various types of cargo, such as proteins, nucleic acids, and metabolites, within the bloodstream.
Wei-Chuan Shih, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the Cullen College of Engineering, and his team conducted a study to examine the quantity and content of small EVs in both cancer patients and healthy individuals. Their findings were quite significant.
“We identified differences in the number and content of small EVs in samples from individuals with cancer compared to those from healthy individuals, allowing us to distinguish between the two,” Shih explained.populations based on our analysis of the small EVs,” reports Shih, in Nature Communications Medicine. “The findings came from combining two imaging methods — our previously developed method PANORAMA and imaging of fluorescence emitted by small EVs — to visualize and count small EVs, determine their size and analyze their cargo.”
In 2020, Shih debuted the PANAROMA optical imaging technology, which uses a glass side covered with gold nano discs that allows users to monitor changes in the transmission of light and determine the characteristics of nanoparticles as small as 25 nanometers in diameter. PANORAMA takes its name fromPlasmonic Nano-aperture Label-free Imaging (PNAliMA), highlights the important features of the technology. This study, which was funded by the National Institutes of Health, focused on detecting cancer by counting the number of small EVs.
“Using a cutoff of 70 normalized small EV counts, all cancer samples from 205 patients were above this threshold except for one sample, and for healthy samples, from 106 healthy individuals, all but three were above this cutoff, giving a cancer detection sensitivity of 99.5% and specificity of 97.3%,” Shih explained.
In order to further evaluate the performance of the technology, additional testing was conducted.The researchers were able to achieve 100% accuracy in analyzing two sets of samples from different types of cancer, including leiomyosarcoma, gastrointestinal stromal tumors, and cholangiocarcinoma. They used a detection threshold of 70 normalized small EV counts in plasma and mixed the cancer samples with healthy samples for analysis. The team, led by Shih, believes that with further optimization, their approach could become a valuable tool for cancer screening and provide valuable insights into the biology of cancer and small EVs. The research team includes doctoral students Nareg Ohannesian and Mohammad Sadman Mallick, as well as collaborators Steven H. Lin.Simona F. Shaitelman, Chad Tang, Eileen H. Shinn, Wayne L. Hofstetter, Alexei Goltsov, Manal M. Hassan, Kelly K. Hunt, from M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. Shih and Lin established Seek Diagnostics Inc. to bring this technology to the market.
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