A University of Houston researcher is reporting a new method to detect cancer which could make cancer detection as simple as taking a blood test. With a 98.7% accuracy rate, the method -- which combines PANORAMA imaging with fluorescent imaging -- has the potential to detect cancer at the earliest stage and improve treatment efficacy.
"We observed differences in small EV numbers and cargo in samples taken from healthy people versus people with cancer and are able to differentiate these two populations based on our analysis of the small EVs," reports Shih, in."The findings came from combining two imaging methods -- our previously developed method PANORAMA and imaging of fluorescence emitted by small EVs -- to visualize and count small EVs, determine their size and analyze their cargo.
"Using a cutoff of 70 normalized small EV counts, all cancer samples from 205 patients were above this threshold except for one sample, and for healthy samples, from 106 healthy individuals, all but three were above this cutoff, giving a cancer detection sensitivity of 99.5% and specificity of 97.3%," said Shih.
His research team includes doctoral students Nareg Ohannesian and Mohammad Sadman Mallick, and collaborators Steven H. Lin, Simona F. Shaitelman, Chad Tang, Eileen H. Shinn, Wayne L. Hofstetter, Alexei Goltsov, Manal M. Hassan, Kelly K. Hunt, from M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. Shih and Lin founded Seek Diagnostics Inc. to commercialize this technology.Nareg Ohannesian, Mohammad Sadman Mallick, Jianzhong He, Yawei Qiao, Nan Li, Simona F. Shaitelman, Chad Tang, Eileen H. Shinn, Wayne L.