An animal study just published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows how, in the not-distant future, doctors may be able to not only detect tumors early in humans, but also monitor the effectiveness of cancer drugs in real time, guide clinical trials of new drugs, and even screen entire populations of symptom-free people for nascent tumors that could have otherwise slipped under the radar.
The potential is huge. And the principal investigator, Sam Gambhir, MD, PhD, is credible: He chairs Stanford's radiology department, directs the Canary Center at Stanford for Cancer Early Detection and has authored or co-authored nearly 600 peer-reviewed research publications.
From my news release about the study:
Imagine: You pop a pill into your mouth and swallow it. It dissolves, releasing tiny particles that are absorbed and cause only cancerous cells to secrete a specific protein into your bloodstream. Two days from now, a finger-prick blood sample will expose whether you’ve got cancer and even give a rough idea of its extent. That’s a highly futuristic concept. But its realization may be only years, not decades, away.
The key to early cancer detection lies in finding valid biomarkers: substances whose presence in a person’s blood or urine flags a probable tumor. (High blood levels of the molecule known as PSA, for example, can signify prostate cancer.) But although various tumor types indeed secrete characteristic substances into the blood, these same substances typically are made in healthy tissues, too, albeit usually in smaller amounts. So a positive test result for, say, PSA doesn’t necessarily mean the person has cancer. Contrariwise, a small tumor just may not secrete enough of the trademark substance to be detectable.
Gambhir’s team appears to have found a way to force any of numerous tumor types to produce a biomarker whose presence in the blood unambiguously signifies cancer, because no adult tissues - cancerous or otherwise - would normally be making it. This particular substance is a protein naturally present in human embryos as they're forming and developing, but absent in adults.
The scientists designed a genetic construct, called a DNA minicircle, that contains a single gene coding for the telltale substance. DNA minicircles are tiny, artificial, single-stranded DNA rings about 4,000 nucleotides in circumference - roughly one-millionth as long as the strand that you'd get if you stretched the DNA in all 23 chromosomes of the human genome end to end.
Gambhir and his colleagues rigged their minicircles so that this sole gene would be "turned on" only inside cancer cells. (For more details on how to do this, please see my release.) They injected the minicircles into mice who had small tumors and mice who didn't. Within 48 hours, a simple blood test indicated the presence of the biomarker in the blood of mice with tumors, but not in the blood of the tumor-free mice.The bigger the tumor volume, the more of the biomarker in the blood.
The technique will likely apply to a broad range of cancers, and can possibly be modified to help pinpoint budding tumors' location in the body.
Previously: Nano-hitchhikers ride stem cells into heart, let researchers watch in real time and weeks later, Nanoparticles home in on human tumors growing in mice's brains, increase accuracy of surgical removal and Nanomedicine moves one step closer to reality
Photo by Jim Strommer
