Sunitha Nagrath, PhD, associate professor of chemical engineering at U-M, led the development of the device. (Credit: University of Michigan)

A prototype wearable device, tested in animal models, can continuously collect live cancer cells directly from a patient’s blood. The device could be an alternative to biopsy and could help doctors diagnose and treat cancer more effectively.

“Nobody wants to have a biopsy. If we could get enough cancer cells from the blood, we could use them to learn about the tumor biology and direct care for the patients. That’s the excitement of why we’re doing this,” says Daniel F. Hayes, MD, the Stuart B. Padnos Professor of Breast Cancer Research at the University of Michigan Rogel Cancer Center and senior author on the paper in Nature Communications.

Over a couple of hours in the hospital, the new device could continuously capture cancer cells directly from the vein, screening much larger volumes of a patient’s blood. In animal tests, the cell-grabbing chip in the wearable device trapped 3.5 times as many cancer cells per milliliter of blood compared to the traditional blood draw samples.

The chip itself is a new twist on one of the highest-capture-rate devices from Nagrath’s lab. It uses the nanomaterial graphene oxide to create dense forests of antibody-tipped molecular chains, enabling it to trap more than 80 percent of the cancer cells in whole blood that flows across it. The chip can also be used to grow the captured cancer cells, producing larger samples for further analysis.

In the next steps for the device, the team hopes to increase the blood processing rate. Then, led by Thamm, they will use the optimized system to capture cancer cells from pet dogs that come to the cancer center as patients. Chips targeting proteins on the surfaces of canine breast cancer cells are under development in the Nagrath lab now.

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