Cancer Detector Boosted

Johnson & Johnson has partnered with Massachusetts General Hospital to develop and market a unique blood test for detecting cancer that could transform our treatment approaches.

Researchers claim the test can find a single cancer cell among billions of healthy ones circulating in a person’s blood. This test is expected to hit the market within the next few years.

Experts think this development has the potential to transform how tumors are treated and to quickly determine if a treatment is working. It is believed the test may potentially transform care of many types of cancer, especially breast, colon, prostate and lung cancer.

Ultimately, the test may offer another way to screen for cancer besides mammograms, colonoscopies, and other diagnostics now in use.

So how does it work? A micro-fluidics chip was designed to capture cancer cells circulating in the blood.

The test is close to clinical use because of a newly formed partnership between Massachusetts General Hospital and Veridex, a diagnostics company owned by New Jersey-based J&J.

The technology “will enable (circulating tumor cells) to be used by both oncologists as a diagnostic tool for personalizing patient care, as well as researchers to accelerate and improve the process of drug discovery and development,’’ the company says.

A prototype, developed by Mehmet Toner and collaborators at MGH, consists of a business-card-size silicon chip dotted with tens of thousands of microscopic posts.

Each post is coated with a molecule which binds to a protein unique to cells from a specific type of tumor, such as prostate, pancreatic or breast cancer. As blood flows through the chip, tumor cells stick to the posts.

In 2007, the research team first demonstrated that the chip can capture these rare cells, which make up just one in a billion cells in a blood sample. This is high enough to analyze them for molecular markers.

The goal is to use the device to tailor cancer treatments to individual patients by monitoring cell counts and by identifying the molecular attributes of an individual’s cancer.

For example, specific markers can highlight a more aggressive form of cancer or a tumor that will respond to specific cancer drugs, while genetic changes in the tumor might prompt a treatment change.

MGH and four other research institutions have received a $15 million grant from the Stand Up To Cancer organization to test the prototype. But the technology is expensive and complicated to use. Each chip costs about $500, according to The Boston Globe.

“We’re limited by our ability to make it fast, easy, cheap, and something that could be done on a global scale,’’ says Dr. Daniel Haber, director of MGH Cancer Center. “Our goal is to build together a third-generation technology … that would be so easy to use and so standard, it wouldn’t have to be a research tool.’’

WMB believes, as the researchers do, that this test could ultimately evolve to become an inexpensive, noninvasive complement to the CT scans and tissue biopsies which oncologists traditionally use to characterize tumors, many times too late.

For example, regular blood tests assessing tumor cell count might be used to determine if a particular treatment is effective.

Toner’s group recently developed a new version of the chip that can capture even more cells.

The inner surface of the device has a herringbone design which generates a vortex in the blood flowing through it, allowing the cells to be in greater contact with the antibodies on the chip's surface.

The chip could detect an isolated cluster of tumor cells, according to research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It may help understand the cancer’s ability to spread, or metastasize, from its original birthplace.

While the true potential of the J&J blood test to detect cancer is not yet known, it’s safe to say better treatments should increase the chances for better outcomes for those with the disease.

This post is by TechMan, WMB co-author. Please share this post.