新技术协助早期癌症生物标记检测

niwanmao

对于癌症，当然是越早诊断治疗效果越好，然而，现实却不同，例如间皮瘤，往往需要到3期或4期才可以诊断出来，此时预后非常差。因此，找到早期诊断的理想方法，就等于挽救了成千上万的患者。
MIT的研究者发明了一种纳米颗粒，可定位至肿瘤并与癌症相关的蛋白产生成千上万种生物标记，从而有助于非常方便地从患者尿中取样检测。研究小组组长Sangeeta Bhatia还说，这些增强出来的生物标记不仅可用于胸膜间皮瘤等癌症的早期诊断，还可用于监测这些疾病的进展程度，从而确定患者是否对某种治疗有反应。
（流式中文网翻译，同时我们也在想，这些纳米颗粒应该是可以通过流式细胞术检测，从这方面来说，一旦这项技术真正成熟并推广开来，流式在癌症诊断方面的重要性肯定得到极大的提高）

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New Technology May Help with Biomarker Detection, Earlier Cancer Diagnosis

Boston, Massachusetts - For individuals who develop a type of cancer that often isn’t perceptible until it has reached a later stage, earlier diagnosis is key to a better prognosis and perhaps even a cure. Cancers like mesothelioma, which are often nearly impossible to diagnose until stage 3 or 4, respond poorly to treatment because of the advanced stage of the disease at the time of detection, so death is often imminent for these patients.

Hence, a way to discover the presence of the disease before it spreads would be tantamount to saving thousands of lives. Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology believe their most recently developed technology could help in the quest for earlier diagnosis of mesothelioma and other tough-to-detect types of cancer.

According to a press release by the college, one way to best detect the presence of cancer is to identify so-called biomarkers – specific proteins that are secreted by cancer cells. Often, however, the quantity of these biomarkers is low and they are hard to identify. Now, MIT researchers have developed nanoparticles that can “home to a tumor and interact with cancer proteins to produce thousands of biomarkers” which will then be easily detected through the sampling of a patient’s urine.

Sangeeta Bhatia, the head of the research team and a member of MIT’s David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, says the enhanced biomarkers could be used not only for earlier detection of diseases such as pleural mesothelioma, but also to monitor the progression of a disease and to determine how the body is responding to certain cancer treatments.

“There’s a desperate search for biomarkers, for early detection or disease prognosis, or looking at how the body responds to therapy,” says Bhatia, who explains that there are some cancers, including breast cancer, which are actually “groups of several diseases with different genetic signatures.”

Doctors at other cancer institutes are hailing the MIT findings, which were profiled in a December issue of Nature Biotechnology, and see the new nanotechnology development as a huge step towards saving more lives through earlier and more directed treatment.

“This new system is an exciting approach to overcoming the problem of biomarker scarcity in the body, says Sanjiv Gambhir, chairman of the Department of Radiology at Stanford University School of Medicine. “Instead of being dependent on the body to naturally shed biomarkers, you’re sampling the site of interest and causing biomarkers that you engineered to be released.”