The authors of a new work have created a device that uses tiny worms to detect cancer cells
Early Cancer Diagnosis is Criticalfor effective treatment, says Nari Jang, a graduate student. Therefore, cancer screening methods must be fast, simple, economical and non-invasive, he notes.
Doctors are currently diagnosing lung cancerusing imaging tests or biopsies, but these methods often fail to detect tumors in the earliest stages. Even dogs can be trained to sniff out human cancer, but keeping them in laboratories is impractical.
The authors of the new work decided to use tinynematode worms, which are about 1 mm long. They are easy to grow in the lab and have an exceptional sense of smell. Therefore, they can be used to develop a non-invasive diagnostic test for cancer.
Lung cancer cells produce a different setodor molecules compared to normal cells. It is also well known that nematodes are attracted or repelled by certain odors, so we came up with the idea that they could be used to detect lung cancer.
Sik Choi, Ph.D., principal investigator of the project
The team made the chip from polydimethylsiloxane elastomer. At each end there was a hole connected by channels to the central chamber.
The researchers placed the chip on an agar plate.They added a drop of nutrient medium from lung cancer cells to one end, and medium from normal lung fibroblasts to the other. They placed the worms in the central chamber and after an hour they noticed that most crawled towards the lung cancer environment. By comparison, worms with a mutation in the odor receptor gene - odr-3 - did not have such a special response to the lung cancer cell culture medium.
The device was effective in 70% of cases.The authors hope to improve both the accuracy and sensitivity of the method by using worms that have previously been exposed to the environment of cancer cells and have a “memory” of cancer-specific odor molecules.
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