Inexpensive Cancer Screening

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This device is many times more efficient and faster than the traditional methods, which use centrifuges to separate proteins from blood serum and then employ a tedious process of chemical extraction that sometimes takes long enough that the proteins are in danger of degrading.

With the new tool a patient's finger is pricked as in a diabetes blood glucose test, and the blood applied immediately to the analysis. "Patients will be able to monitor themselves several times a day like a diabetic taking blood samples," says Hood.

Hood's vision is to create a raft of tests with the precision to diagnose a number of emerging diseases by detecting the unique proteins that all the body's major organs deposit into the blood. "We're developing a strategy to identify blood proteins that are organ-specific," says Hood. Next up are proteins for the brain and then liver.

The new tests should allow physicians to match patients with specific forms of, say, colon cancer, which could suggest individualized strategies for treatment.

Convincing tradition-bound medicine to think this way—to look for dread diseases in advance rather than react to them after they are manifest—is a gargantuan task. "I think it's going to happen, but only if we have the tools that make it inevitable," says Hood.

One drawback right now is that the fluorescent microscopes are expensive and bulky, and would not work in small clinics or in homes. But this issue is likely to be worked out.

"These devices should lead to a decrease in cost and an incredible benefit to patients," pathologist Emil Kartalov of the University of Southern California's Keck School of Medicine told Technology Review. Kartalov developed some of the blood separation technologies used for the chip, but is not collaborating with Hood and Heath.

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