Cancer cells

Microfluidic Chip Achieves High-speed Sorting of Large Cells

August 12, 2017

This microfluidic chip enables cell sorting in 16 μs; the enlarged view shows a demonstration of on-chip cell sorting of a Euglena gracilis cell (time interval of each frame: 40 μs). (Image copyright: Shinya Sakuma, Yusuke Kasai, Takeshi [more...]

Dynamic Microenvironments: Finding the Right Cancer Therapy

July 16, 2017

With so many promising cancer therapies emerging from research labs, a key challenge for biomedical researchers is to develop tools that accurately predict treatment efficacy against a patient’s specific cancer, thereby avoiding [more...]

The Making of a Medical Microchip

June 18, 2017

This chip, developed by Fluidigm, can be used in a microfluidics system to analyse genomic information from samples as small as a single cell (Image credit: Fluidigm) The bioengineers in Dino Di Carlo’s lab at the University of [more...]

Rensselaer Team Develops a New and Practical Method to Measure Cell Stiffness

June 14, 2017

A team including researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has developed an innovative approach to measuring cellular mechanical properties (i.e., cell stiffness) that is part of an emerging label-free (i.e, no histology dyes or [more...]

Sorting out HIV

June 14, 2017

Image Credit: EMBL/Merten Group Around 1% of patients with HIV – known as elite controllers – are able to survive without antiviral treatment, because their immune systems produce certain kinds of HIV-specific antibodies: proteins that [more...]

Microfluidic Device Helps to Detect Myeloma Cells

April 4, 2017

Engineers at MIT have devised a microfluidic technique to capture and count circulating plasma cells from small samples of blood. The technique, which relies on conventional blood draws, may provide patients with a less painful test for [more...]

Smartphone Microscope Offers Cost-effective DNA Sequencing and Genetic Mutation Analysis

January 22, 2017

Working with a smartphone, the device can use different modes to display cell images (Image Credit: UCLA, Stockholm University and Uppsala University) A smartphone-based microscope developed by researchers at the California NanoSystems [more...]

Blood Test Could Provide Cheaper, Better Way for Doctors to Manage Lung Cancer

December 19, 2016

Profiling the genes of lung-tumor cells from patient blood samples may be a cheap, noninvasive way to help doctors choose the right treatments, according to a study led by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine. The new [more...]

WPI Researchers Build “Liquid Biopsy” Chip that Detects Metastatic Cancer Cells in a Drop of Blood

December 18, 2016

A chip developed by mechanical engineers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) can trap and identify metastatic cancer cells in a small amount of blood drawn from a cancer patient. The breakthrough technology uses a simple mechanical [more...]

Cancer Breakthrough Miniature Device Shows Which Drugs Perform Best Against Tumors

December 18, 2016

A microfluidic device used to monitor the response of hypoxic cells (Credit: University of Huddersfield) Researchers at the University of Huddersfield have helped develop a lab device that could speed up the adoption of new anti-cancer [more...]

Isolation of Single Circulating Tumour Cells with Microfluidic Chip

October 2, 2016

The single cell isolation microfluidic chip (Image Credit: National University of Singapore) A microfluidic chip invented by engineers from NUS and start-up Clearbridge mFluidics is a world’s first in using microfluidic flow to isolate [more...]

Microfluidic Chip Enables Fast, Precise Measurement of Single-cell Growth

September 11, 2016

A new technique invented at MIT can precisely measure the growth of many individual cells simultaneously. “The device provides new insights into how cells grow and respond to drugs,” MIT professor Scott Manalis says. (Illustration: [more...]

Circulating Cells In Cancer Patients’ Blood Not Always Cancerous

August 1, 2016

Tumor-derived endothelial clusters (Image credit:Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology) For decades, clusters of cells commonly found in the blood of cancer patients have always been regarded as cancerous cells that have broken [more...]

Acoustic Field Identifies Cancer Cells in Blood

May 28, 2016

Researchers at Lund University in Sweden and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States have developed a method to analyze and separate cells from the blood. Ultimately, the method, which goes under the name [more...]

Microfluidics and Spectroscopic Imaging for Personalized Medicine in Ovarian Cancer

April 2, 2016

With certain cancers, such as ovarian cancers, a significant number of patients are non-responsive to the standard chemotherapy treatment. These patients, therefore, experience the negative side effects of chemotherapy without clinical [more...]

Microneedle Patch Delivers Localized Immunotherapy to Melanoma

March 30, 2016

Biomedical engineering researchers at North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have developed a technique that uses a patch embedded with microneedles to deliver cancer immunotherapy treatment [more...]

New Technique for Rapidly Killing Bacteria

March 20, 2016

An artist’s interpretation of how bacteria cells on a nanoporous gold disk array are killed after exposure to near-infrared light. (Credit: Greggy M. Santos and Wei-Chuan Shih) Researchers have developed a new technique for killing [more...]

Pancreatic Cancer ‘Breakthrough’ Hailed

March 3, 2016

Pancreatic Cancer (Image Credit: University of Glasgow) Researchers in the U.K. have made what is described as a “breakthrough reclassification” of pancreatic cancer, which offers new opportunities to treat the often-fatal [more...]

Device Could Decrease Time Between Cancer Detection and Treatments

January 17, 2016

The acoustophoretic microfluidics device the team built allows it to utilize the pressure generated in the small device to manipulate small fluid samples such as blood drawn during an examination (Image Credit: Texas A&M University) [more...]

DNA Cancer Test Gets Backing from Amazon, Microsoft Founders

January 17, 2016

A small number of companies are working to disrupt the blood testing industry (Image from Wikipedia) Illumina, one of the largest DNA sequencing companies, has announced the formation of a startup known as Grail, which plans to develop [more...]