I found a very interesting science article on a very innovative smart phone application that can diagnose whether a person has cancer or not. Using this device, physicians can tell within an hour whether a tumor is cancerous. This new device has advantages over the current way oncologists are diagnosing cancer; these lab tests may be uncertain and take up to a few days.Ralph Weissleder, a physician/ scientist, and his team at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in Boston developed a device which acts as a tiny nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) machine. Researchers found a way to attach magnetic particles to proteins which are then picked up by the machine from an array of chemicals, similar to those found in a tumor. This device is convenient in size, being much smaller than an NMR found in a lab.
The MGH researchers used the typical procedure used nowadays to collect cells by using a needle from the abdomens of several patients and then labeled the cells that contained magnetic particles, which are supposed to attach to certain proteins associated with cancer. These cells were then injected into the new NMR machine. The device's data can be interpreted using a smart phone application; it detected nine levels of protein markers for cancer cells. The MGH researchers combined the results from four of the nine proteins and accurately diagnosed 48 out of 50 biopsies within an hour for each patient as described by a research article (http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/3/71/71ra16). As a matter of fact, this device was correct 100 percent of the time with a group composed of 20 patients, while standard tests were correct only 74 to 84 percent of the time.
The hope of this new device is to tell a patient whether he/ she has cancer or not the same day as opposed to having to go home and waiting almost a week for the results. This device would also reduce the number of repeated biopsies, which may cost up to thousands of dollars. Also, researchers hope to eventually use this device to track cancer and detect levels of particular proteins from blood samples, and therefore determine if patients are indeed responding to the drugs.
This article caught my attention because ironically other students were blogging about a possible relationship between cell phone radiation and cancer. In this case, a cell phone may even save your life by telling you whether you have cancer! But is this map only available to physicians? What if they do not have a smart phone? Will the patients be the ones responsible for paying the standard biopsy expenses even if this option is available and perhaps cheaper? Is it possible to create other different apps that can monitor other diseases besides cancer? Unfortunately, there isn't much information on this app yet, since it may still be under construction.
