Reminiscent of that 1966 sci-fi classic, Fantastic Voyage, the National Cancer Institute has invested $2 million dollars towards research and development of a tumor tracking microchip.
With the new NCI grant, Dr. John Condeelis, co-chair of anatomy and structural biology at Einstein and the principal investigator of the newly funded program, and his Einstein colleagues will team up with researchers at the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering (CNSE) of the University at Albany to develop a next-generation microchip that, when placed in a cancerous mass, can gather information on the presence of metastatic cells that would demand more aggressive cancer therapy.
“The NCI has placed a very high priority on understanding the ‘dialogue’ in tumor microenvironments that appears crucial for causing cancers to spread,” says Dr. Condeelis. “This five-year Tumor Microenvironment Network grant will allow Einstein to influence the way research is carried out in this emerging and important field.”
Dr. James Castracane, the project’s co-investigator, who is head of the Nanobiosciences Constellation at CNSE, said, “By integrating cutting-edge science and engineering at the nanoscale level with vital biomedical research, it is our intent to provide deeper understanding of the causes of cancer metastasis and migration – knowledge that is of critical importance in the treatment and, ultimately, prevention of cancer.”
Dr. Condeelis has used the multiphoton confocal microscope to directly observe cellular interactions in the tumor microenvironment of live animal models of breast cancer. By placing an artificial blood vessel near tumors, he was able to collect motile cancer cells for study and to predict–by the presence or absence of certain signaling molecules–whether the tumor cells have the potential to metastasize.
The Einstein and Albany researchers will use nanotechnology, which involves studying and working with material on the molecular level, to design a “microchip” version of the artificial blood vessel that Dr. Condeelis has used successfully in animals. The microchip will be assembled from nanoscale components so that several different functions can be carried out within a very small package. The goal: to implant these tiny microchips — just two to three cells in diameter and a tenth of a millimeter in length — in human tumors, where they would remain for days or weeks. The chips would report remotely to scanners that would “read” them on the nature of the cells that infiltrate them–in particular, on whether metastatic cells are present that would call for more aggressive cancer therapy.
Read the full article at Rochester Institute of Technology. . .