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Leveraging Butterfly Wings for Better Cancer Diagnosis

Researchers at UC San Diego have found an unusual ally in the quest to make cancer diagnosis faster, more accurate, and more accessible worldwide: the Morpho butterfly, which owes its brilliance to microscopic structures that manipulate light. Now, researchers are harnessing those same structures to gain detailed insights into the fibrous makeup of cancer biopsy samples — sans chemical staining or expensive imaging equipment.

“We can apply this technique using standard optical microscopes that clinics already have,” said study senior author Lisa Poulikakos  , a professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. “And it’s more objective and quantitative than what is currently available.”

Topics:
Diagnostics Medical

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    Transcript

    00:00:00 I've always been fascinated by how light interacts with different kinds of biological materials my lab Works in nanophotonics so the nanoscale science of light and we develop new kinds of materials that change the interaction of light with matter in new and interesting ways so in this project we're especially interested by the Health Challenge of organ fibrosis so that's the formation

    00:00:23 and development of fibrous biological tissue and it's important to many diseases what we're focused on here is breast cancer so the fibrous properties of breast cancer tissue can really tell you if the disease is early stage or more advanced stage but right now it's very difficult to distinguish those two in the clinic there are state-of-the-art Imaging techniques where we can

    00:00:44 visualize the tissue micr structure um but those are not accessible to clinicians we want to help patients who don't have access to the most sophisticated um high-tech techniques and allow for a much more accessible approach toward diagnosing their fibrotic disease so what we wanted to do was take our understanding of nanoscale light matter and tractions to scale down

    00:01:06 this complicated technique to come up with a quantitative way to assess the tissue micro structure then started studying the optical properties of the Morpho butterfly and we realized that it has the exact properties we're looking for for tissue diagnostic so that was a really exciting Eureka moment um and it has this um very beautiful complexity

    00:01:31 and intricacy um that we can then take advantage of to enhance the optical effects we're looking for the Morpho has these like super like long gradings along their scales that have a specific direction that will respond to polarized light polarized light is special because it propagates in a specific Direction there are certain materials that are sensitive to

    00:01:55 these polarizations of light and will respond to it selectively it causes a super high reflection when you image with our super special polarized light microscope um very high sensitivity of Reflections at certain angles and so this is something that we could use to introduce for Imaging tissues cuz tissues have biological fibers the most abundant fiber being collagen and

    00:02:20 collagen fibers are also very sensitive to the um polarization of light the only issue is that property in biological tissues is much weaker so what we decided to do and check out is if we could Leverage The morpho butterflies polarized light sensitivity um to basically interface the Morpho with the tissue to enhance the tissue signal so you can actually visualize what's

    00:02:45 happening um when you're Imaging it this polarized light sensitivity tells us about what we're Imaging within the tissue there's a lot of things that go into diagnosing cancer and one of the main things is looking at collagen Arrangement so what this method could help you distinguish is collagen Arrangement itself and then that is a tool a pathologist would use for

    00:03:09 determining cancer stage so this expedites the process and makes it easier and more accessible cuz you don't have to do any chemical staining or use a super powerful um or Optical components you just use a slide with a butterfly wing on it cut out a wing put it on a glass slide um interfaced with a tissue sample I don't have to do anything else

    00:03:33 really you just need a simple uh simple setup so we're not changing the Optics or the equipment but we're using the nanoscale science of light um to create a surface um that allows us to assess the tissue having a butterfly wing as our Optical surface that diagnoses and characterizes the tissue doesn't require any expensive nanofabrication facilities

    00:03:57 the goal of our technology is that we can apply in a simple Optical microscope that's available to clinicians in all kinds of settings um even in low under resourc settings but it's also more objective and quantitative than what is currently available using light as a biophysical marker of disease allows us to uh basically come up with all kinds of

    00:04:21 different solutions that maybe wouldn't have been thought of before