UT Austin Licenses Technology for Skin Cancer Detection

Detection and treatment of cancer for any patient can be emotionally and physically difficult, especially with the current methods used today. Biopsies are invasive and can be painful, and having to wait long amounts of time for a diagnosis can be almost torturous. At the University of Texas in Austin, a team under Dr. James Tunnel has licensed the technology that they believe can detect skin cancer using a probe.

The company sponsoring this is DermDx, based out of California. The company is sponsoring further research at Dr. Tunnel’s laboratory, as well as at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where the ideas of the detection probe were first discussed. Researchers believe this will change skin cancer detection in many god ways because patients will not have to go through invasive biopsies and they will get the results faster.

The probe works by emitting pulses of light from the probe onto the skin or tissue in question and the results are sent to a computer system for analysis. The light that is emitted onto the skin is measuring the cellular and molecular signatures of skin cancer. The probe can be moved to all different parts of the skin.

The probe is not on the market yet because it is to undergo more clinical trials. So far, the results are promising, as they have tested it on over 80 patients at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center with good results.

This article is very interesting to me because I am very interested in cancer research, and hope to study cancer advancements as a future career after I graduate. The technology researchers are using today is fascinating, and since cancer is one of the most dominant diseases today, any bit of research will help in curing the disease.

http://insciences.org/article.php?article_id=1893

Alicia Capps