European research centres have made a series of micromachined lab chips that together can find and identify two or three breast cancer cells amongst 10,000,000 other cells in 5ml of blood.
"To detect cancer from blood, these rare circulating tumor cells need to be isolated, enriched and their genetic content has to be identified," said Belgian lab IMEC.
"Current diagnostics performed in medical laboratories are labour- intensive, expensive and time-consuming. They require many sample pre-processing steps in different medical instruments so that the full analysis takes more than a day."
The experimental system implements a standard medical protocol that searches for 20 cancer biomarkers.
Normally requiring six different laboratory machines and taking a day, the processed has been squeezed into a series of modules that fit on a single desk.
An incubation module mixes the blood sample with tiny magnetic beads coated so that they bind chemically only to tumor cells.
The second module uses a combination of dielectrophoresis and magnetic sensing to separate tumor cells, non-magnetic cells and spare beads; and count the tumor cells - the number of cells is statistically linked to life expectancy.
In the amplification module, the cell wall of the tumor cells is destroyed and the mRNA genetic material is extracted and amplified based on multiplex ligation dependent probe amplification.
Within this module, specific assays amplify the 20 markers that are expressed in breast carcinoma cells.
In the final detection module, the amplified genetic material is detected using an array of electrochemical sensors allowing the cancer type to be identified.
So far the system has worked with clean blood samples to which cancer cells have been added and has yet to be tried on samples from potential cancer sufferers.
"The modules are now ready for integration into a single lab-on-chip," said IMEC.
The partners are: IMEC, the Institut fur Mikrotechnik Mainz (Germany), AdnaGen (Germany), Universitat Rovira i Virgili in Sweden, NorwegianRadium Hospital (Norway), MRC Holland (The Netherlands), and FuijerebioDiagnostics (Spain).
The project is called MASCOT and was partly funded by the European Commission.