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Sadly, about 40 percent of us will hear those three words within our lifetime,
and half will not survive.
This means that two out of five of your closest friends and relatives
will be diagnosed with some form of cancer,
and one will die.
And this is exactly what researcher Joshua Smith and his team has been doing.
Researcher Joshua Smith is developing a nanobiotechnology "cancer alarm"
that scans for traces of disease in the form of
special biomarkers called exosomes.
For the past five years, he's been developing technologies
that could ultimately aid clinicians
with rapid, early-stage cancer diagnostics.
And he's been fueled by a deep scientific curiosity,
and a passion to change these statistics.
in the year 2016 however,
this fight became much more personal
when his wife was diagnosed with breast cancer.
It was an experience that added a strong and unexpected emotional dimension
to his efforts.
He knows firsthand how life-altering treatment can be,
and he's keenly aware of the emotional havoc
that cancer can wreak on a family.
Because they found it early during a routine mammogram,
they were able to focus primarily on treatment options
for the localized tumor,
reaffirming to them how important an early diagnosis is.
Unlike other forms of cancer,
mammograms do offer an early-stage screening option for breast cancer.
Still, not everyone has this done,
or they may develop breast cancer
before the middle age recommendation for having a mammogram.
So, there's still a lot of room for improvement,
even for cancers that do have screening options,
and, of course, considerable benefits for those that don't.
A key challenge then for cancer researchers
is to develop methods
that make regular screening for many types of cancers
much more accessible.
Imagine a scenario where during your regular checkup,
your doctor can take a simple, noninvasive urine sample,
or another liquid biopsy,
and present you with the results before you even leave the doctor's office.
Such a technology could dramatically reduce the number of people
who slip through the net of an early-stage cancer diagnosis.
Joshua Smith's research team of engineers and biochemists
is working on exactly this challenge.
They're working on ways to frequently activate an early-stage cancer alarm
by enabling regular screenings that would start when a person is healthy
so that action could be taken to stop cancer the moment it emerges,
and before it can progress beyond its infancy.
The silver bullet in this case are tiny vesicles,
little escape pods regularly shed by cells called exosomes.
Exosomes are important biomarkers
that provide an early-warning system for the development of cancer.
And because they're abundantly present in just about every bodily fluid,
including blood, urine and saliva,
they're extremely attractive for noninvasive liquid biopsies.
There's just one problem.
An automated system for rapidly sorting these important biomarkers
is not currently available.
they've created a technology that they call Nano-DLD
that is capable of precisely this:
automated exosome isolation
to aid rapid cancer diagnostics.
(De Guzman)
In a nutshell,
a set of tiny pillars separated by nanoscopic gaps
are arranged in such a way
that the system divides the fluid into streamlines,
with the larger cancer-related nanoparticles being separated
through a process of redirection from the smaller, healthier ones,
which can in contrast
move around the pillars in a zigzag-type motion
in the direction of fluid flow.
The net result is a complete separation of these two particle populations.
You can visualize this separation process
(Quindiagan)
Even before Joshua Smith's wife's bout with cancer,
it was a dream of his to facilitate the automation of this process --
to make regular screening more accessible,