A new way to detect cancer and HIV

A biomedical engineer at Harvard Medical School and an MIT aeronautical engineer have designed a carbon-Nano tube device designed to detect cancerous cells in a simple blood device. This will allow doctors to determine if cancer has spread from the original site. This device could be of great benefit particularly to third world countries where expensive diagnostic equipment is much more difficult to get a hold of. The device could potentially be low cost thus letting doctors in the impoverished nations detect cancer more easily. Tone, biomedical engineer, had developed an earlier version of the device which took blood from a patient and allowed the blood to flow past thousands of silicon posts coated with antibodies. The antibodies would stick to tumor cells. A problem of this device however was that some cells never touched the posts at all. He revised the idea by making a porous design with the help of the aeronautical engineer. This new device now detects cancerous cells eight times better than the previous version. The tumor cells that are in the blood have broken free from the original site and are usually hard to detect because there are only a few cells for every 1 ml sample that has tens of billions of cells. The carbon nanotubes are incredibly thin and porous. For every square centimeter of carbon nanotubes, there are 10 billion to 100 billion tubes with the composition being 99 percent air and 1 percent carbon. This is important because it gives the blood room to flow. As in the previous design, the surface of each tube is painted with antibodies. Another interesting aspect of this design is the ability to change the spacing between the carbon nanotubes in order to catch different size objects from a tumor cell to 40nm virus including HIV. This article was interesting to me because to the ability to detect cancer and HIV in third world countries. I believe many people living with HIV don’t even know it because there is not enough equipment to go around and test people. By the time a patient receives to diagnosis of cancer or HIV, it may be too late for them. With a low cost medical device, checkups would be more feasible thus making thus survival rate much higher. I am fortunate that my uncle had a checkup, and they found prostate cancer early on. Since the doctors found the cancer early on, his chances of survival are dramatically increased.