Rice wins NIH funding for oral-cancer test

Grand Opportunity grant funds rapid saliva test using lab-on-a-chip

09-Nov-2009 - USA

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded researchers in rice University's new BioScience Research Collaborative (BRC) a $2 million Grand Opportunity (GO) grant to develop a fast, inexpensive test for oral cancer that a dentist could perform simply by using a brush to collect a small sample of cells from a patient's mouth.

"We want to provide an accurate diagnosis for oral cancer in less than 30 minutes using a minimally invasive test that requires no scalpels or off-site lab tests," said principal investigator John McDevitt, Rice's Brown-Wiess Professor in Bioengineering and Chemistry. "The payoff for this could be tremendous because oral cancers today are typically diagnosed much too late in their development."

The new test is possible because of a novel microchip invented in McDevitt's lab. This "lab-on-a-chip" uses the latest techniques in microchip design, nanotechnology, microfluidics, image analysis, pattern recognition and biotechnology to shrink many of the main functions of a state-of-the-art clinical pathology laboratory onto a microchip the size of a postage stamp.

The microchips are mounted on disposable, plastic cards that are slotted into a battery-powered analyzer. A brush-biopsy sample is placed on the card and microfluidic circuits wash cells from the sample into a reaction chamber. The cells pass through mini-fluidic channels about the size of small veins and come in contact with biomarkers that react only with specific types of diseased cells. The machine uses two LEDs to light up various regions of the cells and cell compartments. Healthy and diseased cells can be distinguished from one another by the way they glow in response to the LEDs.

The oral-cancer test will be developed in collaboration with scientists at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio and the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom. In addition to cancer, McDevitt's lab is developing tests for heart attacks and HIV, and it is developing a process to produce the disposable cards for pennies apiece.

https://www.bionity.com/en/news/109065/rice-wins-nih-funding-for-oral-cancer-test.html