In a breakthrough, an Indian- American
scientist at the prestigious MIT has
developed a
simple, cheap, paper test that could improve cancer diagnosis rates and help
people get treated earlier.
The diagnostic, which works much like a pregnancy
test, could reveal within minutes, based on a urine sample, whether a person
has cancer, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) announced. This
approach has helped detect infectious diseases, and the new technology allows
non-communicable diseases to be detected using the same strategy, it said.
The technology, developed by MIT professor
and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator 46-year-old Sangeeta Bhatia, relies on
nanoparticles that interact with tumour proteins called proteases, each of
which can trigger release of hundreds of biomarkers that are then easily
detectable in a patient's urine. "When we invented this new class of
synthetic biomarker, we used a highly specialised instrument to do the
analysis," says Bhatia, the John and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Health
Sciences and Technology and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
"For the developing world, we thought it
would be exciting to adapt it instead to a paper test that could be performed
on unprocessed samples in a rural setting, without the need for any specialized
equipment. The simple readout could even be transmitted to a remote caregiver
by a picture on a mobile phone,"Bhatia said in a statement.
Bhatia, a member of MIT's Koch Institute for
Integrative Cancer Research and Institute for Medical Engineering and Science,
is the senior author of a paper describing the particles in the Proceedings of
the National Academy of Sciences published this week.
Sangeeta N.
Bhatia,
M.D., Ph.D. (b. 1968) is an Indian American biological engineer and professor
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
United States. Bhatia's research investigates applications of micro- and
nano-technology for tissue repair and regeneration. In 2003, she was named to
the MIT Technology Review TR100 as one of the top 100 innovators in the world
under the age of 35. She was also named a "Scientist
to Watch" by The Scientist in 2006, and Howard Hughes Medical Institute
investigator in 2008.
Bhatia co-authored the first undergraduate
textbook on tissue engineering and was an editor for two books, Microdevices in
Biology and Medicine and Biosensing.