October 7, 2015
Could cancer be diagnosed with a simple blood test? A new chip can trap the one cancer cell in a billion normal cells.
Sunitha Nagrath and her lab developed the chip with other members of the Translational Oncology team, which seeks to produce technologies for improving cancer diagnosis and treatment that are ready for the clinic, to help real patients quickly. When the team runs a blood sample through the chip, it can catch breast, lung and pancreatic cancer cells. These cells can then be grown on the chip to learn more about the disease in a specific patient.
Sunitha Nagrath is an assistant professor of chemical engineering and biomedical engineering at the University of Michigan College of Engineering. Her research goal is to bring the next generation of engineering tools to patient care, especially in cancer. Her major focus of research is to develop advanced MEMS tools for understanding cell trafficking in cancer through isolation, characterization and study of circulating cell in peripheral blood of cancer patients. Research at The Nagrath Lab pertains to developing microfluidic devices for isolating and studying circulating tumor cells (CTCs) as related to metastasis.