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Fiber-Optic Array Scanning Technology for Cancer Detection

Detection of cancer cells in blood is an important tool for diagnosis and monitoring of solid tumors in early stages, as well as during and post-therapy. Scientists at the nonprofit research institute SRI International have employed a rare cell detection to characterize and identify new predictive protein biomarkers on circulating tumor cells (CTC) from patient blood samples. The Fiber-Optic Array Scanning Technology (FAST) laser can scan 25 million white blood cells in one minute.

Topics:
Diagnostics Fiber Optics Imaging Lasers & Laser Systems Medical Patient Monitoring Photonics

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    Transcript

    00:00:17 it's been known for a century that cancer cells can be found in the circulating blood of cancer patients but the problem was that we couldn't find they were very difficult to find because you can imagine that these were just very few cells or very rare cells as we call them

    00:00:34 among a vast number of normal cells that were found in the blood so the way we address this problem is with a combination of two technologies the first technology finds those cells in the circulating blood distinguishes them from the normal cells and this is what we call the fast

    00:00:52 scanner the fast laser can scan 25 million white blood cells in one minute we start off with a 7.5 mil blood sample from a patient from there we isolate the white blood cells along with the circulating tumor cells we call ctcs and go through a process in which we label all these cells with a cocktail of

    00:01:11 antibodies and these antibodies are fluorescent tags that tag specifically the circulating tumor cells the laser can detect this fluorescence of the circulating tumor cells the second technology couples with this first technology to then hone in on each individual cancer cell that says identified

    00:01:29 and to extract critical information from those cells about the patient's disease we can load the slide onto automated digital microscope and with this we can take high resolution images we can zoom in on each of these circulating tumor cells and see specifically the structures each protein

    00:01:47 biomarker labels the limitations of biopsies include the fact that they're taken from it just a given point in time there are times when biopsies are not even feasible because either the patient's primary tumor has already been removed or the disease has spread and in

    00:02:04 addition of course biopsies are invasive and can actually cause complications we can do this analysis at any time during the patient's treatment actually before therapy begins during therapy and even after therapy is over but in addition to that we are able to get

    00:02:23 very specific information about what i was what i call the biomarkers that actually can inform physicians what the best mode of therapy is for that patient in the case of breast cancer we have had done some very interesting studies in collaboration with our clinical partners so for example we have been analyzing

    00:02:45 two important biomarkers on the circulating cancer cells these biomarkers are called er and her2 and these two proteins are receptors that tell the physician how likely that patient is to respond to a given targeted therapy which produces a better quality of life for these patients

    00:03:05 and can also improve the patient outcomes