Toothbrush-like instrument that could detect oral cancer just in 15 minutes with a gentle touch.
In a breakthrough, scientists have developed a toothbrush-like instrument that could detect oral cancer just in 15 minutes with a gentle touch.
A team of scientists led by researchers at the Rice University have created a nano-bio-chip that was found to be 97 per cent "sensitive" and 93 per cent specific in detecting which patients had malignant or premalignant lesions.
The minimally invasive technique would deliver results in 15 minutes instead of several days, as lab-based diagnostics do now, the researchers said.
"And instead of an invasive, painful biopsy, this new procedure requires just a light brush of the lesion on the cheek or tongue with an instrument that looks like a toothbrush," they added.
"One of the key discoveries in this paper is to show that the miniaturised, noninvasive approach produces about the same result as the pathologists do," said lead researcher John McDevitt.
Oral cancer afflicts more than 300,000 people a year and the five-year survival rate is 60 per cent, but if cancer is detected early, that rate rises to 90 per cent, the journal Cancer Prevention Research reported.
McDevitt and his team are working to create an inexpensive chip that can differentiate premalignancies from the 95 per cent of lesions that will not become cancerous.
"This area of diagnostics and testing has been terribly challenging for the scientific and clinical community," McDevitt said, adding "Part of the problem is that there are no good tools currently available that work in a reliable way."
He said patients with suspicious lesions, usually discovered by dentists or oral surgeons, end up getting scalpel or punch biopsies as often as every six months.
"People trained in this area don't have any trouble finding lesions. The issue is the next step -- taking a chunk of someone's cheek. The heart of this paper is developing a more humane and less painful way to do that diagnosis, and our technique has shown remarkable success in early trials," McDevitt said.
source:www.deccanchronicle.com.
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