A biomedical investigator in the Department of Anesthesiology, Perioperative and Pain Medicine, Morteza Mahmoudi Ph.D., and other investigators have shown that biomolecules that are found in the blood of healthy people create various corona profiles that are placed around nanoparticles. These nanoparticles collect a coating of proteins found in the blood. Mahmoudi and her colleagues have shown evidence that these corona profiles are precise and personalized, with numerous patterns or compositions in patients with cancer.
They have created a sensor array that was tested on blood samples, both from different types of cancer and those who do not have cancer but still went to a diagnosis. They aim to make an early detection test that clinics could use to know who is at risk of cancer and other illnesses.
Mahmoudi said in an interview that for cancer and other forms of diseases, it is best to diagnose patients early because it means that patients can be treated early and extend their survival rate, giving them a better quality of life. She is the former director of the nano-bio interactions laboratory at Tehran University of Medical Sciences where she began her research in 2014.
Mahmoudi said that her goal is to develop a certain strategy that can help people to get better information about their overall health. In the clinics today, there are ways to measure lipids and to predict the risk of cardiovascular disease, but the ways of predicting cancer is very limited. Mahmoudi and her team hope that their work will lead to a screening test for early signs of cancer.
Her team combined the concepts of protein coronas so that they can carry out their investigation. These are disease-specific with sensor array technology. The sensor arrays can show a wide variety of interacting biological chemical and compounds all at once instead of isolating them. Her team made a sensor array that is made of three different cross-reactive liposomes so that they can test blood samples for early patterns of disease, and they added fatty molecules that cause protein coronas to mold around them.
They tested the sample from five patients, and each of them has a different type of cancer: lung cancer, glioblastoma, meningioma, myeloma, and pancreatic cancer. Her team found that the pattern of corona composition that was selection, through advances classification detected by the sensor array, gave a fingerprint that is unique for each cancer. They also tested the tool using a blood sample from 15 other people who were diagnosed with brain, lung and pancreatic cancer up to eight years later, and they found out that this could discriminate and identify the cancers at early stages.
Even though this research and investigation is promising, Mahmoudi's team have results that still need to be validated in a larger group to make sure that the test is not only applicable to cancer patients, but it also gives accurate diagnostic information.
