'Worm-on-a-chip' device could someday help diagnose lung cancer

Dogs can smell cancer in human breath, blood and urine. The roundworm C. elegans wriggles its way toward cancer cells by following an odor trail. Scientists report a device that uses worms to detect lung cancer. Doctors could someday use thisworm-on-a-chip to diagnose cancer at an earlier stage.

The results will be presented at the spring meeting of the American Chemical Society.

The graduate student presenting the work at the meeting says that early diagnosis of cancer is critical for effective treatment and survival. Cancer screening methods should be easy to use. Doctors can diagnose lung cancer by using diagnostic tests, but they often can't detect tumors at their earliest stages. Although dogs can be trained to sniff out cancer, they are not practical to keep in labs. The principal investigator of the project decided to use worms that are small and easy to grow in the lab to develop a cancer diagnostic.

Lung cancer cells produce a different set of odor molecule than normal cells. They wanted to make a form of the test easy to understand.

The team made a chip out of polydimethylsiloxane that had a well at each end connected to a central chamber. The chip was placed on the agar plate. They put culture media from lung cancer cells at one end of the chip, and normal lung fibroblasts at the other. They put worms in the central chamber and after an hour, they noticed that more worms had crawled toward the lung cancer media than the normal media. The worms with the odr 3 gene did not show preferential behavior.

The researchers estimated that the device was 70% effective at detecting cancer cells in cell culture media. They hope to increase both the accuracy and sensitivity of the method by using worms that were previously exposed to cancer cell media. The team will work with doctors to find out if their methods can detect lung cancer in patients. The device will be tested on multiple forms of cancer.

The researchers identified the specific odor compounds that attract C. elegans to lung cancer cells, including a volatile organic compound called 2-ethyl-1-hexanol.

More information: Non-invasive lung diagnosis system using odorant markers in Caenorhabditis elegans-on-a-chip, ACS Spring 2022. acs.digitellinc.com/acs/live/22/page/677 Citation: 'Worm-on-a-chip' device could someday help diagnose lung cancer (2022, March 20) retrieved 20 March 2022 from https://phys.org/news/2022-03-worm-on-a-chip-device-lung-cancer.html This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.