Recently at TEDGlobal 2014, Jorge Soto, a cancer technologist, gave a talk about a startup he co-founded, Miroculus. Early detection of cancer is imperative in the long road towards recovery. Making early detection even harder is the fact that there are so many different variations of cancer out there. Jorge and his team have developed an affordable device to detect certain patterns in miRNA taken from blood to quickly diagnose cancer.
The steps toward diagnoses in this device include taking a simple blood sample that can be prepared with a Miroculus kit. The blood sample is pipetted into a standard 96 well plate that is then loaded into the device for approximately 60 minutes. Each well has its own patented biochemical reagents to detect certain miRNA. If those miRNA strings are present, the well will light up green. A smartphone is then used to analyze the speed of reaction and analyze the data to give an accurate diagnosis. So far, Jorge states that the device has been able to accurately pinpoint miRNA expression patterns for pancreatic cancer, lung cancer, breast cancer, and more.
The ingenuity shown by this team is great. They demonstrated that it does not take many years of research to develop something new, rather the creativity of combining some preexisting technologies to create something new is just as effective. Though still in the early stages, this device holds a lot of potential for the field of oncology.
TEDGlobal 2014 Talk: The future of early cancer detection?
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