DNA tentacles identify recurring leukaemia

Cancer cells might evade the body's defences, but dodging DNA tentacles is another matter. A jellyfish-inspired device might make it easier to diagnose cancer in its early stages.

When people with conditions like leukaemia are in remission, it's important to establish as early as possible if their cancer has returned.

Finding out involves passing a sample of blood through a microfluidic device, in whose tiny channels cancer cells can be captured and identified. However, this only works well if blood passes through extremely slowly, so that any cancer cells bump into the channels' sides, which are lined with adhesives designed to trap specific cells. This is highly time-consuming, and the method can also fail to spot cells at the early stages of cancer, when numbers are very low.

So Jeffrey Karp at the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts, together with Weian Zhao at the University of California, Irvine, and Rohit Karnik at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have devised a better method?&ndsah; by following the lead of jellyfish. "We thought it would be incredibly useful if we could mimic jellyfish and functionalise microfluidic devices with long tentacles," says Karp.

The tentacles are actually strands of DNA encoded to match an enzyme on the surface of leukaemia cells. The researchers found the strands trapped an average of 50 per cent of the cells, compared with 10 per cent using existing systems, and at a much faster flow rate.

The cancer cells could also be cleaved from the tentacles much faster than the team was able to using the adhesive.

"I do like the idea of using long and flexible structures to extend into the flow," says Mehmet Toner at Harvard Medical School, who was not involved in the study. He points out that the tests were performed under idealised conditions, and so more work remains to be done to optimise the system.

"This is really just a first demonstration," says Karnik. "There are a lot of knobs that can be tweaked ? maybe we want longer or shorter strands, for instance."

Journal reference: PNAS, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1211234109

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