Houston researcher advances promising method for diagnosing cancer at early stages

One day, would detecting cancer be as simple as taking a blood test? Wei-Chuan Shih, a researcher at the University of Houston and professor of electrical and computer engineering in the Cullen College of Engineering, reported a 98.7 percent accuracy rate for a method his lab developed to identify cancers in their early stages.

The technology combines Shih’s PANORAMA (PlAsmonic NanO-apeRture label-free iMAging) with fluorescent imaging to visualize nanometer-sized membrane sacs, called extracellular vesicles, or EVs. Electric vehicles transport different types of cargo, including proteins, nucleic acids and metabolites, through the bloodstream.

“We observed differences in the number of small electric vehicles and in the loading of samples taken from healthy people and people with cancer and are able to differentiate these two populations based on our analysis of the small electric vehicles,” reports Shih, in Nature Communications Medicine. “The results come from combining two imaging methods – our previously developed PANORAMA method and imaging of fluorescence emitted by small electric vehicles – to visualize and count small electric vehicles, determine their size and analyze their cargo. »

Shih introduced PANORAMA in 2020. The technology uses a glass face coated with gold nanodiscs that allows users to monitor changes in light transmission as well as determine the characteristics of nanoparticles as small as 25 nanometers in diameter. For the new publication, Shih and his team simply had to count the number of small electric vehicles in order to detect cancer.

“Using a threshold of 70 small normalized EV counts, all cancer samples from 205 patients were above this threshold, except for one sample, and for healthy samples, from 106 individuals in healthy, all but three were above this threshold, giving a cancer detection sensitivity of 99.5% and specificity of 97.3%,” says Shih.

The team was able to report 100% accuracy through additional testing that analyzed two independent sets of stage I-IV or recurrent leiomyosarcoma/gastrointestinal stromal tumor and early and late stage cholangiocarcinoma samples combined with healthy samples.

Shih and his collaborator Steven H. Lin founded Find diagnostics with the aim of commercializing the technology they have innovated. In 2022, the duo joined the Texas Medical Center Innovation’s cancer-focused accelerator.

Wei-Chuan Shih is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the Cullen College of Engineering at the University of Houston. Photo via UH.edu