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Graphene Oxide Microfluidic Chip Captures Cancer Cells

A new chip can trap the one cancer cell in a billion normal cells from a simple blood test. Sunitha Nagrath, assistant professor of chemical engineering at the University of Michigan, and her lab developed the chip with other members of the Translational Oncology team, which seeks to produce technologies for improving cancer diagnosis and treatment that are ready for the clinic. When the team runs a blood sample through the chip, it can catch breast, lung, and pancreatic cancer cells. These cells can then be grown on the chip to learn more about the disease in a specific patient.

Topics:
Diagnostics Fluid Handling Materials Medical Motion Control Nanotechnology Test & Measurement

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    Transcript

    00:00:00 Sometimes of off-the-shelf technologies won't work you have to think out of the box so he's going to bond the graphene oxide chip here with the polymer, it's really cool huh? (laughter). Our whole lab focuses on detecting cancer cells. How the diseases has been detected is still in the classical way. They take a tumor tissue, send it to a pathologist sit it in a microscope and look at the tissue.That is the way it was being done 90 years ago. Ninety percent of the cancer related deaths are due to the metastasis not to the primary tumor.

    00:00:34 I think you need to come up with some fresh ideas. It would be really nice if you could grab those cancer cells and analyze them rather than looking at the primary tumor itself. This is a minimally invasive test: just a simple blood draw and then you look for the cancer cells in that blood. The biggest challenge in doing this is that cancer cells are very rare in the blood so there might be maybe 1 to 5 cells per milliliter of the blood that is like one cell against a billion other cells. Using microfluidic technology we could manipulate the sample

    00:01:08 on a substrate very specifically so we can put the cells where we exactly want so that we can capture the cells of our interest with high sensitivity and the rest of the blood cells go away. The chip is so small, this is like almost like a business card. So we apply an antibody on the substrate and then you pass the blood through this chip the gold part you see is really the gold structures. There is a flower pattern gold on the surface only by using a microscope you can see among billions of cells may be 4 or 5 cells express the antibody that these we are targeting and they get captured on the surface immediately and at the end of the day we

    00:01:48 have these maybe 10 cells on the chip and we can begin to analyze them under the microscope or we can lyse these cells, extract the nucleic acids and do some downstream genomic analysis. It took almost two years for us to get this, actually, and then it started working. It crossed three different cancers: breast, prostate, and lung. We really believe that we have a technology that is much more sensitive than what was there before, by the use of these nano materials. We make these molds in the Lurie Nanofacrication Facility

    00:02:21 north campus/engineering campus so this is the mold which is made in the clean room and then we pour the polymer here, baked inside an oven. Take it out, cut the devices and then now we bond them to a glass slide so this comes out really cheap that way and then we can make easily design changes, patient-specific, so that you can tailor make your technology rather than just making a toy and just leave it in the lab you want to take it all the way to the hospital. I see the potential of the circulating tumor cells in changing the way we are

    00:02:57 treating tumors, detecting tumors it can make a huge difference. I think we should always dream big (laughs). There is a saying: If you shoot for the stars at least you'll end up on the moon (laughs). We would love to do that if possible. Related Video: The fungus produces enzymes that break down the biomass into its component sugars and then the bacteria will eat those sugars and turn them into isobutanol...