Giant Magnetoresistance kan worden ingezet in de opsporing van kanker

Wetenschappers van de Stanford University hebben een nieuwe microchip gemaakt die kan helpen bij de  opsporing van kanker.  De techniek van de microchip device maakt het mogelijk om proteine tumor  markers in bloed op te sporen.

The MIT Technology Review schrijft er het volgende over:

Wang’s device takes advantage of giant magnetoresistance, a phenomenon that won its discoverers the 2007 Nobel Prize in physics. The device is built on a silicon chip arrayed with 64 magnetic sensors called spin valves. Each valve is coated with a different kind of antibody, a molecule primed to latch on to a particular cancer protein. When the chip is exposed to blood serum, the target proteins stick to the antibodies. Wang then adds a solution of magnetic nanoparticles, also attached to antibodies, that stick to the captured proteins. The magnetic field of the captured nanoparticles measurably changes the resistance of the underlying spin valve, allowing Wang to determine the concentration of cancer proteins in the serum.

In tests where the Stanford prototype scanned for cancer proteins, including a marker of colon cancer, it was two orders of magnitude more sensitive than the standard technique for detecting blood proteins, which uses a similar antibody capture sandwich in combination with fluorescent tags.

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