Scientists Develop New Laser That Can Find and Destroy patients' hands and found that within
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Cancer Cells in the Blood
(By Yasemin Saplakoglu June 15, 2019)
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Cancer cells can spread to other parts of the body through
the blood. And now, researchers have developed a new
kind of laser that can find and zap those tumor cells from
the outside of the skin.
Though it may still be a ways away from becoming a
commercial diagnostic tool, the laser is up to 1,000 times
more sensitive than current methods used to detect tumor
cells in blood, the researchers reported June 12 in the
journal Science Translational Medicine.
To test for cancer spread, doctors typically take blood
samples, but often the tests fail to find tumor cells even if
they are present in a single sample, especially if the
patient has an early form of cancer, said senior author
Vladimir Zharov, director of the nanomedicine center at
the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.
If the tests do come back positive, that typically means
there's a high concentration of circulating tumor cells in
the blood; at that point, the cancer has likely spread
widely to other organs and it's often "too late to
effectively treat patients," Zharov added. [Top 10 Cancer-
Fighting Foods]
Years ago, Zharov and his team came up with the idea of
an alternate, noninvasive method to test larger quantities
of blood with a greater sensitivity. Taking the familiar
route, they tested it in the lab, then on animals and
recently brought it to clinical trials in humans.
The new technology, dubbed the Cytophone, uses pulses
of laser light on the outside of the skin to heat up cells in
the blood. But the laser only heats up melanoma cells —
not healthy cells — because these cells carry a dark
pigment called melanin, which absorbs the light. The
Cytophone then uses an ultrasound technique to detect
the teensy, tiny waves emitted by this heating effect.
They tested the technology on 28 light-skinned patients
who had melanoma and on 19 healthy volunteers who
didn't have melanoma. They shone the laser onto the
minutes, the technology could identify circulating tumor
cells in 27 out of 28 of those volunteers.
Finding and killing tumor cells
The device didn't return any false positives on the healthy
volunteers, and it didn't cause safety concerns or side
effects, they said. Melanin is a pigment that is normally
present in the skin, but skin cells aren't harmed, Zharov
said. Even though the skin produces melanin naturally, this
laser technique doesn’t harm those cells. That’s because
the laser light exposes a relatively a large area on the skin
(so it's not focused enough on individual skin cells to
damage them), while the laser energy is more
concentrated on the blood vessels and circulating tumor
cells, he added.
Unexpectedly, the team also found that after the
treatment, the cancer patients had fewer circulating
tumor cells. "We used a relatively low energy" with the
primary purpose of diagnosing rather than treating the
cancer, Zharov said. Yet, even at that low energy, the laser
beam seemed able to destroy the cancer cells.
Here’s how it works: As the melanin absorbs the heat, the
water around the melanin inside the cells begins to
evaporate, producing a bubble that expands and collapses,
mechanically destroying the cell, Zharov said.
"Our goal is by killing these cells, we can help prevent the
spreading of metastatic cancer," he said. But he hopes to
conduct more research to optimize the device further to
kill more tumor cells, while still being harmless to other
cells.
They also haven't yet tested the device on people with
darker skin, who have higher levels of melanin. Even so,
only a very small percentage of African Americans get
melanoma.
The team hopes to expand the technology to find
circulating tumor cells released by cancers other than
melanoma. These cancer cells don't carry melanin, so to
detect them, the researchers would first need to inject the
patients with specific markers or molecules that would
bind to these cells so that they can be targeted by the
laser. They have so far demonstrated that this technique
could work on human breast cancer cells in the lab.