[ad_1]
SALT LAKE CITY – The treatment of cancer can be quite difficult, but researchers at Brigham Young University believe that monitoring a treatment, whether it is functional or not, could be easier.
Ryan Kelly, an associate professor of chemistry and recently transferred from the northwest to BYU, has developed a technology to detect tiny cells responsible for certain cancers in the body and to identify proteins providing information about cancer .
"Previously, the only thing you can do (circulating tumor cells) is to count them, which is usually correlated with cancer," he said. "But it's not always effective, we want to go beyond that."
By measuring proteins in cells that come directly from cancerous tumors, Kelly said doctors would be better equipped to know what worked with a treatment regimen and continue or modify the treatment accordingly.
"Proteins are the products targeted by drugs," he said. "They can tell us what's wrong with the body."
And, while doctors can and usually do biopsies to check if a given treatment works, Kelly assumes that they do not do it as often as they would like. Surgery can be invasive, he said.
Thus, instead of a large amount of tissue taken from the body during a biopsy, Kelly's research shows that the same information is available in the proteins of a single cell.
This, he says, can be achieved with a simple blood test.
"With further development, it should be very helpful to monitor the impact of a treatment on cancer," said Kelly, adding that by analyzing specific cells, circulating tumor cells from directly from a tumor in the body, "we can find solutions will provide caregivers with information that would cause them to change a dosage or change treatment option."
"It's a bit like developing a new microscope, in that we can look at things more accurately than in the past," said Kelly, who remains affiliated with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory of the US Department of Energy. , where the experiments of his the most recent researches were carried out.
He was attracted to cancer research because of his "value to society".
The research, funded by the National Cancer Institute's National Institute of Health, was published in the latest issue of Analytical Chemistry.
Kelly and her team, some of whom remain at the laboratory in Washington, have filed three patents on microscopic technology that they have developed. It is expected that he is ready to be fired within two years.
pics
Related stories
Source link
