Cancer is a condition characterized by uncontrollable cell growth or reproduction in a specific part of the body, which will ultimately invade surrounding tissues and metastasize to distant sites. Most of the time, cancer has been advanced and possibly spread throughout the body by the time it's diagnosed. Therefore, cancer diagnosis and treatment is a competition against time, for which efforts have been made to find informative biomarkers, such as mutated nucleic acids, secreted proteins, and tumor cells, that can indicate cancer at the relatively early stage.
Researchers at the Concordia University recently published a study in the journal Biosensors and Bioelectronics, which introduced a new liquid biopsy approach using lab-on-a-chip technology, aiming at detecting cancer prior to the forming of a tumor.
Microfluidic Chip to Capture Cancer Biomarkers
This liquid biopsy method is developed on the basis of a microfluidic chip targeting extracellular vesicles, or known as exosomes, which contain cargo like proteins, nucleic acids, metabolites, and other molecules originated from the parent cell. Cargo could be indicative biomarkers if they carry toxic signs of cancer or other diseases and spread from cell to cell. The small microfluidic chip is equipped with magnetic nanoparticles coated in a specially designed bonding agent, which can attract and capture particles containing cancer-causing biomarkers. Cancer detection on microfluidic chips allows analyzing and identifying the cancer type carried by these particles so as to significantly improve cancer diagnosis and treatment.
The paper's senior author, Muthukumaran Packirisamy, introduced that with a droplet of organic liquid, which could be blood, saliva, and urine, the chip can trap and attach the exosomes in the fluid to the treated nanoparticles. It enables researchers to separate these exosomes from the nanoparticles and carry out further proteomic and genomic analysis for specific cancer type determination. For instance, researchers could use this microfluidic chip for urine analysis to detect bladder cancer cells in early diagnosis.
Fluids as Ideal Sampling Specimens
Microfluidic chips are powerful tools for biological analysis not only in the field of fundamental biology but also in clinical applications, food safety, and environmental monitoring due to high sensitivity, high throughput, and low cost. They allow timely detection and analysis of biologically active small molecules such as oligonucleotides, oligopeptides, oligosaccharides, vitamins, minerals, and metabolites existing in tears, saliva, sweat, urine, blood, etc. Compared to traditional exploratory surgeries, liquid biopsies using microfluidic chips can avoid the trauma of invasive biopsies by sampling and analyzing body fluids to easily get cancer markers and cancer prognoses.
Moreover, with a precision diagnosis of the cancer type granted by this novel liquid biopsy method, it's possible to develop a treatment specifically targeting the cancer cells rather than use conventional chemotherapy that targets all kinds of cells and causes significant side effects.
Though the study is based on breast cancer cells, researchers are expanding a variety of disease testing. The liquid biopsy chip is believed to revolutionize medical diagnostics and could be a potential point of care device for diagnostics, just like home pregnancy tests.
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