Tag: cancer

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Can Locusts Smell Human Cancer?

Researchers have shown that locusts can not only “smell” the difference between cancer cells and healthy cells, but they can also distinguish between different cancer cell lines.

However, patients need not worry about locusts swarming their doctors’ offices. Rather, the researchers say this work could provide the basis for devices that use insect sensory neurons to enable the early detection of cancer using only a patient’s breath.


 Although such devices aren’t on the immediate horizon, they’re not as far-fetched as they might sound, said the authors of the new research shared May 25 on the website BioRxiv. (BioRxiv, pronounced “bio archive,” is a pre-print server that hosts research articles before they’ve been peer reviewed.)


Part of that is because people have grown accustomed to technology that augments or outperforms our natural senses. For example, telescopes and microscopes reveal otherwise invisible worlds. The success of engineered devices can make it easy to overlook the performance of our natural tools, especially the sense organ right in front of our eyes.
“Noses are still state of the art,” said Debajit Saha, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Michigan State University. “There’s really nothing like them when it comes to gas sensing.”


That’s why we trust dogs and their super-sniffers to detect telltale smells of drugs, explosives and, more recently, health conditions including low blood sugar and even COVID-19.


 Scientists are working on technology that can mimic the sense of smell, but nothing they’ve engineered can yet compete with the speed, sensitivity and specificity of old-fashioned biological olfaction.


 “People have been working on ‘electronic noses’ for more than 15 years, but they’re still not close to achieving what biology can do seamlessly,” said Saha, who also works in the Institute of Quantitative Health Science and Engineering, or IQ.


“Early detection is so important, and we should use every possible tool to get there.” – Christopher Contag, director of the Institute for Quantitative Health Science and Engineering

https://msutoday.msu.edu/news/2022/sniffing-out-cancer-with-locust-brains

AR #120

Technologies of the Animals

by William B. Stoecker

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Sound Destroys Tumors Permanently

Noninvasive sound technology developed at the University of Michigan breaks down liver tumors in rats, kills cancer cells and spurs the immune system to prevent further spread—an advance that could lead to improved cancer outcomes in humans.


By destroying only 50% to 75% of liver tumor volume, the rats’ immune systems were able to clear away the rest, with no evidence of recurrence or metastases in more than 80% of animals.


“Even if we don’t target the entire tumor, we can still cause the tumor to regress and also reduce the risk of future metastasis,” said Zhen Xu, professor of biomedical engineering at U-M and corresponding author of the study in Cancers.


Results also showed the treatment stimulated the rats’ immune responses, possibly contributing to the eventual regression of the untargeted portion of the tumor and preventing further spread of the cancer.


The treatment, called histotripsy, noninvasively focuses ultrasound waves to mechanically destroy target tissue with millimeter precision. The relatively new technique is currently being used in a human liver cancer trial in the United States and Europe.


In many clinical situations, the entirety of a cancerous tumor cannot be targeted directly in treatments for reasons that include the mass’ size, location or stage. To investigate the effects of partially destroying tumors with sound, this latest study targeted only a portion of each mass, leaving behind a viable intact tumor. It also allowed the team, including researchers at Michigan Medicine and the Ann Arbor VA Hospital, to show the approach’s effectiveness under less than optimal conditions.


“Histotripsy is a promising option that can overcome the limitations of currently available ablation modalities and provide safe and effective noninvasive liver tumor ablation,” said Tejaswi Worlikar, a doctoral student in biomedical engineering. “We hope that our learnings from this study will motivate future preclinical and clinical histotripsy investigations toward the ultimate goal of clinical adoption of histotripsy treatment for liver cancer patients.”
Liver cancer ranks among the top 10 causes of cancer related deaths worldwide and in the U.S. Even with multiple treatment options, the prognosis remains poor with five-year survival rates less than 18% in the U.S. The high prevalence of tumor recurrence and metastasis after initial treatment highlights the clinical need for improving outcomes of liver cancer.


Where a typical ultrasound uses sound waves to produce images of the body’s interior, U-M engineers have pioneered the use of those waves for treatment. And their technique works without the harmful side effects of current approaches such as radiation and chemotherapy.


Since 2001, Xu’s laboratory at U-M has pioneered the use of histotripsy in the fight against cancer, leading to the clinical trial #HOPE4LIVER sponsored by HistoSonics, a U-M spinoff company. More recently, the group’s research has produced promising results on histotripsy treatment of brain therapy and immunotherapy.
The Research has been published online by the journal MDPI. https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6694/14/7/1612/htm

 

AR #128

“The Sound of Healing”

by Jeane Manning