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July 1st, 2007

Developing nanotechnology noses to 'smell' cancer

Abstract:
Biomarkers are of increasing importance in modern medicine for the purpose of early detection and diagnosis of a disease, for instance cancer. Biomarkers are mostly protein molecules that can be measured in blood, other body fluids, and tissues to assess the presence or state of a disease. For example, the presence of an antibody may indicate an infection or an antigen, such as PSA, might indicate the presence of prostate-specific cancer cells. Although protein-based approaches to early detection and diagnosis of cancer have a clear advantage over other, more invasive, methods, protein detection is a challenging problem owing to the structural diversity and complexity of the target analytes. State-of-the-art detection methods have limited application due to their high production cost and instability. Another limitation of current proteomic diagnostics is the limitation of arrays to one or a few markers only; in other words, you can only test for the specific markers that you are looking for and not generally measure levels of proteins in your blood in order to detect anomalies. A novel nanotechnology based protein detector array could change that.

Source:
nanowerk.com

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