What will be the new cancer diagnostic devices?
Anton Buzdin, Post-science
Within the framework of the project "Where is a high-tech business born?", post-science experts talk about promising research tasks, the solution of which will not only produce a scientific and technological breakthrough, but will also have a noticeable economic effect. Doctor of Biological Sciences Anton Buzdin talks about promising methods of diagnosing oncological diseases.
As we know, anything is possible in the future. Let's take a regular mobile phone. It has not been just a phone for a long time, this device has gone very far from the device with a handset and a disk that we remember from childhood. The mobile phone includes a camera, a video camera, a calculator, a timer, a notebook and much more. The same thing can happen with a device that performs cancer diagnostics. But is it possible to create a fundamentally new device that would replace all existing ones and give some new paradigm for cancer diagnosis? Presumably, this is possible.
Cancer diagnosis is a very broad topic. If we are talking about early diagnosis of the fact that a malignant tumor is beginning to develop somewhere in a person, obviously, such a device would examine blood samples and other physiological fluids, analyze the accumulation of mutations and, if a certain threshold number is exceeded, would give an alarm signal. We are talking about mutations, because with the development of cancer, repair mechanisms deteriorate, mechanisms that contain the DNA of the cell in order. That is, when some damage occurs – and they occur all the time – the repair mechanisms eliminate them. Imagine that a cleaning strike has started at the airport. This will lead to the fact that a clean airport will turn into a sewer. The same thing happens with the genome of a cancer cell. The reparation system is somehow taken out of the game either "intentionally" or accidentally under the influence of some unfavorable environmental factors. This previously neat and pretty mechanism for maintaining the genome stops working, and the genome becomes literally a garbage dump, in which a huge number of mutations accumulate.
Thus, it turns out that a cancer cell contains much more mutations than a normal one. Cancer cells grow and die intensively, as our immune system fights them. In addition, due to the mechanism of growth of tumor tissue, some cells lack resources, they are clogged by more successful, arrogant and rapidly multiplying brethren, and they die, and fragments of their genome enter the blood, urine, and so on. Therefore, DNA fragments of deceased cancer cells are present in the blood. And if the threshold level of mutant variants of DNA molecules is exceeded in the blood, then this may be a signal that something is wrong in the body. I would venture to assume that not only cancers, but also inflammatory processes, chronic infections and so on lead to this. But in any case, the detection of an increased number of mutations in DNA will indicate that it is worth concentrating on finding some internal problems of the body.
After that, it is necessary to systematically examine the entire body. To do this, you can design a device that will report exactly where the tumor was formed. After that, obviously, you need to somehow understand what this tumor is, take a sample of biomaterial for laboratory tests, which are already very complex and quite effective. For this purpose, a third device can be used, which is precise, directly from the tumor development site, no matter how small it is, to take a sample of biomaterial. At the moment, this is a very difficult task, and in some cases it is simply impossible to take the material. Next, the biomaterial must be analyzed using various laboratory tests that will immediately give answers to all questions. This may be the fourth device.
In any case, the principle of universal early diagnosis, as it seems to me, can be built on the analysis of a large array of DNA molecules. It is the modification of DNA analysis methods, as I think, that is the most promising direction in this field. This does not mean that in the future, necessarily child approaches will be used relative to those that exist now. Most likely, these will be some fundamentally new technological processes that allow faster and cheaper DNA research.
In general, DNA analysis methods are developing very quickly. Thus, methods of large-scale and relatively cheap determination of the DNA structure have become known since 2005, and have been widely used since 2008-2009. And although the interest in this topic is huge all over the world, unfortunately, the development of technology has slowed down somewhat in recent years, and not for scientific and technical reasons. The branch of production of sequencers (devices for determining the structure of DNA) and new generation reagents was actually monopolized by several manufacturers, which led to the fact that prices for the read nucleotide (an analogue of a bit of information) actually stopped falling some time ago. This is a completely unacceptable situation, despite the fact that progress is running forward by leaps and bounds. Apparently, this is due to the fact that large companies that have monopolized the market are busy buying up competing technologies at early stages of development and do not allow the expansion of the competitive field. Thus, the technologies that could displace them simply do not reach their final incarnation.
About the author:
Anton Buzdin – Doctor of Biological Sciences, Head of the group of genomic analysis of cell signaling systems
Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry named after Academicians M. M. Shemyakin and Yu. A. Ovchinnikov of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru05.12.2014