Meet the Scientists
[
The best way to get a jump on a disease is by
preventing it in the first place — eating a
healthy diet, exercising regularly, staying up
to date on vaccinations. . .
]
Take cancer, for example. Cancer is largely a disease of aging, and the population of the
U.S., Canada, Europe, Japan, and other developed nations is aging. Indeed, unless researchers develop radically different kinds of anticancer therapy, cancer will soon surpass heart
disease as the leading cause of death in the industrialized world.
Fortunately, as in Ehrlich’s day, chemists are poised to bring about a second revolution
in medicine. This 21st-century revolution promises an age of more effective therapies with
fewer side effects, and perhaps most importantly, one that won’t bankrupt the national
treasury.
Mansoor Amiji, Ph.D.
Lab on a Chip
“The best way to get a jump on disease is by preventing it in the first place — eating a
healthy diet, exercising regularly, staying up to date on vaccinations, and so on. But not
all diseases are preventable — yet — so the next best option is to detect disease as early
as possible.”
Neil Reginald Beer, Ph.D.
That was Dr. Neil Reginald Beer of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. This
chemist is developing a disposable device about the size of a packet of sugar that would
detect specific DNA and RNA molecules associated with specific diseases or infections. In
a paper that was published in the ACS journal Analytical Chemistry, Dr. Beer and his colleagues describe their use of microfluidics to detect the genetic material — the RNA — of
single virus particles.
What is microfluidics? Think laboratory on a chip, where liquid samples of blood or saliva
flow through microscopic pipes about the thickness of coarse hair. Think mixing chambers
smaller than a comma. And it’s all built with essentially the same technology used to create
computer chips.
Imagine your doctor taking a tiny fraction of a drop of blood or saliva, injecting it into a
microfluidic pipe, or channel, and within minutes taking an optical measure that provides
critical diagnostic information. That’s the promise of microfluidic devices such as the ones
that Dr. Beer is building. And then imagine doing that on hundreds or even thousands of
samples, one right after the other.
Niren Murthy, Ph. D.
The Golden Touch
Microfluidic devices represent one powerful new technology that is about to change the way
doctors diagnose disease. Dr. Weihong Tan, of the University of Florida, is taking another
approach, one that relies on some clever chemistry combined with gold nanoparticles, to
find the molecules, known as biomarkers, that distinguish diseased cells from healthy ones.
Dr. Tan’s research relies on molecules known as aptamers. Aptamers are small pieces of
synthetic RNA that recognize and bind to very specific molecular markers, acting very
much like artificial antibodies.
Earlier in 2008, Dr. Tan and his colleagues described their work with aptamers as diagnostic agents in the ACS journal Analytical Chemistry. In this report, the researchers showed
that they could create aptamers that would stick to distinct types of cancer cells. One
aptamer, for example, recognized lung cancer cells, while another would bind only to liver
cancer cells, and a third stuck to a specific type of leukemia cell.
Dr. Tan then showed that he could spot those aptamers — and the cancer cells they were
sticking to — by linking them to gold nanoparticles, which emit powerful optical signals. If
the results of these experiments are confirmed in larger studies, physicians could diagnose
cancer within minutes of taking a blood sample or biopsy.
