Device that can detect cancer through a simple urine test developed

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Soon, a urine sample could be used to detect cancerous cells in your body. A team of researchers centred at Nagoya University have developed a novel medical device that can efficiently capture extracellular vesicle and potentially use them to screen for cancer.

Extracellular vesicles (EVs) can be thought of as small "chunks" of a cell that are able to pinch off and circulate throughout the body to deliver messenger cargo to other cells.

"EVs are potentially useful as clinical markers. The composition of the molecules contained in an EV may provide a diagnostic signature for certain diseases," lead author of the study, Takao Yasui explains.

"The ongoing challenge for physicians in any field is to find a non-invasive diagnostic tool that allows them to monitor their patients on a regular basis—for example, a simple urine test."

EVs are known to harbour microRNAs, which are short pieces of ribonucleic acid that play diverse roles in normal cellular biology.

The presence of certain microRNAs in urine might serve as a red flag for serious conditions such as bladder and prostate cancer.

However, this is a big breakthrough but there remain certain practical hurdles to bring in in regular medical practice. One such hurdle: finding a feasible method to capture EVs in sufficient quantities to analyse them in a routine clinical setting.

"The content of EVs in urine is extremely low, at less than 0.01 percent of the total fluid volume. This is a major barrier to their diagnostic utility," Yasui notes.

“Our solution was to embed zinc oxide nanowires into a specialized polymer to create a material that we believed would be highly efficient at capturing these vesicles. Our findings suggest that the device is indeed quite efficient. We obtained a collection rate of over 99 percent, surpassing ultracentrifugation as well as other methods that are currently being used in the field."

The research team then compared the microRNAs of EVs isolated from healthy patients with those isolated from patients who were already diagnosed with bladder, prostate, and other forms of cancer.

"Sometimes finding just one reliable microRNA is considered a success. Using this approach, we were surprised to find that not just one, but whole combinations of microRNAs might be associated with different types of cancers. The findings are preliminary, of course, but we hope our device can help to lay the groundwork for easier ways to diagnose life-threatening diseases as early as possible," co-author Yoshinobu Baba added.

You can read the full report here.