In a paper published in 'Science Translational Medicine' a group of researchers from University of Texas, Austin, announce they have created a device that can accurately diagnose cancer cells during surgery. The device is an handheld MasSpec Pen and the device has patents pending. "Although a surgeon’s goal is to remove cancer in its entirety during excision surgery, achieving negative margins (absence of cancer cells at the outer edge of the excised tumor specimen) can be challenging. To facilitate intraoperative diagnosis, Zhang et al. developed a handheld pen-like device that rapidly identifies the molecular profile of tissues using a small volume water droplet and mass spectrometry analysis. After 3 s of gentle physical contact with a tissue surface, the water droplet is transported to a mass spectrometer, which characterizes diagnostic proteins, lipids, and metabolites..." the UT Austin team wrote in their paper.
MedicalXpress reported lead researcher, Zhang said, "When designing the MasSpec Pen, we made sure the tissue remains intact by coming into contact only with water and the plastic tip of the MasSpec Pen during the procedure, the result is a biocompatible and automated medical device that we are so excited to translate to the clinic very soon."
And, Livia Schiavinato Eberlin, an assistant professor of chemistry at UT Austin who designed the study and led the team, said "If you talk to cancer patients after surgery, one of the first things many will say is 'I hope the surgeon got all the cancer out. It's just heartbreaking when that's not the case. But our technology could vastly improve the odds that surgeons really do remove every last trace of cancer during surgery." MedicalXpress also reported. The low impact diagnosis method is reported to be 150 times quicker than the current Frozen Section Analysis which can take up to 30 minutes. The pen uses a water droplet on the tip of the MasSpec pen, which the surgeon puts into contact with the tissue to be diagnosed. The surgeon controls the device with a foot pedal, which draws up the droplet and the sample, and transports them to a mass spectrometer which automatically identifies if it is cancerous, the result is transmitted to a video display unit simply as "Cancer" or "Normal". MedicalXpress also reported, "In tests performed on human samples, the device was more than 96 percent accurate for cancer diagnosis. The team has also demonstrated that it accurately diagnoses cancer in live, tumor-bearing mice during surgery without causing any observable tissue harm or stress to the animals." The paper can be viewed at:
The MedicalXpress article can be viewed at:
Author: Tom Michaels, UberSci Page: