He cancer it is the second leading cause of death in the world and one of the keys to lowering those standards is early detection. At Sydney University of Technology in Australia, they created a device which analyzes cells from the blood to identify stages of disease.
“Managing cancer through the evaluation of tumor cells in blood samples is much less invasive than taking tissue biopsies. It allows doctors to repeat the tests and monitor the patient’s response to treatment,” said Majid Warkiani, a professor at the university.
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How does it work
Static Droplet Microfluidic is the name of the device, which is capable of analyzing circulating tumor cells, which have detached from a primary tumor and entered the bloodstream.
For its operation, the device uses a unique metabolic sample that the cancer has and thus differentiates tumor cells from blood cells. Thanks to this filter, the process optimizes detection times, which using other methods can take longer and be more expensive.
This device analyzes and separates blood cells from cancer cells. (Unsplash)
“A single tumor cell can exist among billions of blood cells in just one milliliter of blood, so it is very difficult to find. The new detection technology has 38,400 cameras capable of isolating and classifying the number of metabolically active tumor cells,” said Warkiani.
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Another key feature for the device to identify cancer cells is that it uses pH-sensitive fluorescent dyes to control the increase in lactate in organisms, since tumors tend to produce more of this type of substance.
Thanks to the use of this device, a solution was found to one of the biggest problems of cancer: metastasis. By studying the cells taken from the blood sample, information is obtained about the movement of the disease and its forms contribute to the development of new treatments.
This device analyzes and separates blood cells from cancer cells. (Unsplash)
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Those in charge of this project want to take it to medical centers, clinical and research laboratories so that doctors can “diagnose and control cancer patients in a practical and profitable way”, due to the high costs and time generated by the analyzes through the current technologies.
To achieve this, the university is preparing a provisional patent for the device and thus begin to market it.
The danger of electronic cigarettes
A study from the University of Southern California School of Medicine, in the United States, provided new evidence showing that electronic cigarettes they do have negative long-term health consequences.
The researchers discovered that the vapers and smokers have similar levels of damage to the dna, more than double that of non-smokers.
Those devices heat a liquid to create aerosols that are inhaled by the user. The so-called electronic liquids may or may not contain nicotine (but not tobacco), although they also often contain additives, flavors and chemicals that can be toxic to people’s health, the World Health Organization (WHO) has warned.
In the study, people who used mint or fruit flavored liquids showed the highest levels of DNA damage within the additives.
In addition, they explained that DNA damage is generally related to serious diseases such as cancer of mouth that was first observed in pipe smokers in the past and later in cigarettes.
