Detecting tumor markers easily

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Blood is just teeming with proteins. It’s not easy there to identify specialized tumor markers indicating the presence of cancer. A new method now enables diagnostics to be carried out in a single step. Scientists will present the analysis equipment at analytica, the international trade fair in Munich April 1-4.Benign growth, or cancer?Tumor markers in the blood help determine whether the patient is afflicted with a malign tumor and whether it is excreting markers more vigorously — involving highly specific proteins. An increased concentration in the blood provides one indication of the disease for physicians. However, it has been quite expensive in time and effort to detect the markers thus far. This is because all kinds of molecules and proteins are teeming in the blood. To be able to detect a single specific one, doctors must first separate and purify the blood in several steps, and then isolate the marker they are searching for from the rest of the molecules.This will go faster in future. Researchers in the Project Group for Automation in Medicine and Biotechnology PAMB of the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation IPA in Mannheim, Germany, have developed a one-step analysis. “Our goal is to detect biological molecules in blood, or in other kinds of samples from the patient such as urine, that indicate diseases,” explains Caroline Siegert, a scientist at IPA, “and do so without having to laboriously process the blood, but in one single step instead.”Lower noise, higher signalThe difficulty in detecting specific molecules in the blood or urine lies in the enormous number of substances that are mixed in the liquid. …


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