Lab-on-Chip System Developed for Cancer Diagnosis

A promising methodology to diagnose cancer dissemination or to follow up cancer patients during therapy has been developed.

A lab-on-a-chip (LOC) is a device that integrates one or several laboratory functions on a single chip of only millimeters to a few square centimeters in size. LOCs deal with the handling of extremely small fluid volumes down to less than pL (picoliters).

The detection of circulating and disseminated tumor cells by a LOC system, integrating the many processing steps, would enable a faster, easy-to-use, cost-effective detection of tumor cells in blood. The detection analyses of these tumor cells are performed in medical laboratories requiring labor intensive, expensive, and time-consuming sample processing and cell isolation steps. A full tumor-cell detection analysis can take more than a day. The development of a fully automated, LOC platform to isolate, count and genotype circulating and disseminated tumor cells is envisaged within the framework of the Interuniversity Microelectronics Center (IMEC; Leuven, Belgium).

For genotyping, the messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) genetic material, will be extracted from the cells and multiple cancer related markers will be amplified based on multiplex ligation dependent probe amplification (MLPA) followed by their detection using an array of electrochemical sensors. MLPA facilitates the amplification and detection of multiple targets with a single primer pair. In a standard multiplex PCR reaction, each fragment needs a unique amplifying primer pair. These primers being present in a large quantity result in various problems such as dimerization and false priming. With MLPA amplification of these probes, many sequences (up to 40) can be amplified and quantified using just a single primer pair. MLPA reaction is fast, cheap, and very simple to perform. The resulting lab-on-chip tumor detection system will be well ahead of the current state-of-the-art, revolutionizing cancer diagnostics and individualized theranostics.

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Interuniversity Microelectronics Center