Spitting Image

CANCER CAN BE a difficult discussion, but the newest ways we can detect the disease are worth talking about. These six scientific starters are all about getting an early diagnosis, which can lead to a vastly better outcome.

A Hole New Thing

A biomedical engineering team at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology is using nanopores – incredibly tiny holes – to detect early signs of cancer. The Israeli researchers are working with nanopores that are about 100,000 times thinner than a piece of paper. When these holes are drilled into ultra thin silicon membranes, they can be used in the lab to scan the properties of suspect DNA molecules as they pass through them, potentially picking up on biomarkers for colorectal and lung cancers before they’ve progressed past stage I.

Your saliva can deliver gobs of information about your health. Earlier this year, scientist David Wong at UCLA presented a new saliva test for cancer. His test uses a prototype device to check for a specific gene mutation that’s linked to lung cancer and is especially common in Asian countries. In earlier research, Wong has shown that saliva carries biomarkers for non-small-cell lung cancer. One of the advantages of saliva testing is that it can produce results in minutes, much faster than blood testing. And Wong’s test requires only a drop of spit, which patients find more appealing than a needle poke in the arm to withdraw blood.

Protein Power

In other bodily fluid breakthroughs, the Centre for Molecular Oncology at Barts Cancer Institute in London has come up with a urine test for early-stage pancreatic cancer. Pancreatic cancer often doesn’t cause any symptoms until it’s well advanced, which is why, in four out of five cases, the cancer has already spread by the time it’s diagnosed. The new test, which can recognize about 1,500 different proteins in urine, checks for the presence of three specific proteins that appear in high amounts in patients with pancreatic cancer. In a study released last year, this com-