Can a Pen Be the Next Big Diagnostic Tool for Breast Cancer? LOVE LOVE LOVE THESE NEW DISCOVERIES.
Can a Pen Be the Next Big Diagnostic Tool for Breast Cancer?
https://www.findatopdoc.com/Healthy-Living/famous-people-faced-with-the-pain-of-ibd
Researchers have been developing a pen that can be used as a biopsy tool and surgical tool to help surgeons determine which cells in the patient's body are cancerous. Anyone who has ever undergone surgery to remove a tumor knows how stressful it can be.
Worries about whether or not that removed all of the tumor or not are prevalent among both patients and surgeons; no surgeon wants to leave cancer cells behind. Imagine being a surgeon and finding out the patient’s cancer came back because not all of the tumor cells were removed.
Now, imagine being a patient whose cancer relapsed, and being told you need to go back under the knife--the only one who wins is the cancer.
Background
The pen is able to detect cancer cells in as little as 10 seconds using a small water droplet and mass spectrometry analysis. When the pen is placed softly on tissue for 3 seconds, the water droplet is transported up into a mass spectrometer, “which characterizes diagnostic proteins, lipids, and metabolites”. The pen’s size is comparable to that of a regular writing pen, and is handheld in the same manner. It is easy to use and up to 96% effective in determining whether a patient's tissue is healthy or cancerous.
The pen was tested on a variety of different types of brain, lung, breast, ovary, and thyroid cancers and was able to identify different cancer subtypes as well. As research continues, they hope to hone in the pen’s identification abilities so it can accurately identify even more specific features of the cancer cells. Perhaps one of the best parts about the pen is that it can do all this without damaging healthy tissue.
Oftentimes, healthy tissue is removed in large quantities if it’s difficult to determine where the cancer begins and ends. In order to avoid leaving the cells behind, surgeons will remove beyond where they believe the healthy tissue begins just to be “safe”. This is understandable, but is not necessary with the use of the pen. For cancer that is present in multiple areas or “honeycombed” throughout the tissue, this pen will help surgeons identify each area that’s cancerous. In the case of breast tissue, it can be difficult to remove all the cancerous tissue using regular removal techniques due to the number of glands, tissue types, and fat. It’s easy for the cancer to hide and spread.
The development of this pen could prove to be the end of that dilemma.
Research
The research involved in the development of this pen was intricate and taxing. The different types of cancer that were tested are breast, lung, thyroid and ovarian, while research is still being conducted on brain and pancreatic cancers. Each cancer underwent several different forms of testing with a variety of different patients, giving researchers a ballpark average of the “sensitivity” of the testing. In the research, you will see the terms “sensitivity”, “accuracy,” and “specificity.” According to the Mac Spec Pen website, “Sensitivity is defined as the percentage of correctly identified cancerous samples. Specificity is defined as the percentage of correctly identified normal samples. Accuracy is defined as the average of sensitivity and specificity.”
The pen's accuracy when it comes to breast cancer is 95.6%
While studying breast cancer, researchers used 65 patients, 29 with cancer and 16 without. The type of cancer being tested was Ductal Carcinoma, which was accurately identified 100% of the time. The sensitivity of the pen was marked at 87.5%, and the overall accuracy of the pen was valued at 95.6%. Breast cancer was an incredibly important tissue to study for the pen due to the delicate nature of the breast tissue. With breast cancer, it is quite common for cancer cells to be left behind after surgery, which is why there is such a high recurrence rate with the cancer. This pen will help to lower the numbers of recurrence and extend the overall survival rate of breast cancer patients.
With lung cancer, the pen is up to 95.5% accurate
The lung cancer studies were done on a total of 95 patients; 47 without cancer and 48 with cancer. Within the cancer patients, several different types of cancers were identified at a specificity rating of 95.7%. The pen diagnosed 17 patients with Adenocarcinoma, 17 with Squamous cell, and 14 with other types of lung cancers. The accuracy of the specificity was ranked among both specific forms of cancer between 93% and 95.5%. The sensitivity of the pen was ranked at 88.2% for both Adenocarcinoma and Squamous cell cancer.
Lung cancer, like breast cancer, involves surgery to remove the infected tissue from the lung. The cancer itself is so lethal due to the location of the cancer and the delicate nature of lung tissue. Removing too much lung can make it difficult for a patient to function normally without breathing assistance, which is something physicians try to avoid.
Overall accuracy for ovarian cancer was rated at 94.7%
Ovarian cancer was studied on a total of 57 patients; 29 without cancer and 28 with cancer. The cancer was able to accurately identify cancerous tissue at 100% and was able to specify the type of cancer (High-grade serous) 89.7% of the time. The overall accuracy was rated at 94.7%. For High-grade serous ovarian cancer, recurrence of the cancer is quite common due to cancerous cells left behind, which is the reason it was chosen for the study. With the use of the pen, it was able to determine which tissue was healthy and which was cancerous 100% of the time.
The pen is also 94.7% accurate when it comes to thyroid cancers
Removal of the thyroid gland can be debilitating to patients, but can be necessary if the initial surgery doesn’t remove all of the cancerous cells. The study on thyroid cancer involved 56 patients; 27 without cancer and 29 with cancer. Of the 29 with cancer, two different types were identified; Papillary carcinoma and Follicular adenoma. For Papillary carcinoma, the pen was able to distinguish cancer cells among healthy cells 94.4% of the time, identify the type of cancer 100% of the time, and had an overall accuracy rate of 97.8%. For Follicular adenoma, the pen was able to distinguish cancerous cells from healthy cells 90.9% of the time, identify the type of cancer 96.3% of the time, and had an overall accuracy rate of 94.7%.
This new tool has an extremely promising future
For any tool in the medical field, maintaining a consistent average of 95% is unheard of. Once this tool is implemented in the medical industry, it will become a staple among surgeons and a must have in every cancer removal operation. As far as the future is concerned, studies are currently being done on both brain and pancreatic cancers, two of the most lethal forms of cancer to date. Being able to identify the type of brain cancer a patient has will be incredibly important in establishing an effective treatment focused on the specific form of cancer. An unfortunate oddity among brain cancer patients is, after the initial diagnosis and operation, the cancer then has to be reclassified based on the way the cancer responds to treatment.
Improving the survival rate is the end goal
Being able to identify the type of cancer upfront will eliminate the need for “trial and error” and give the patient a better chance at remission. Many cancers are often not diagnosed until the later stages, and these later stages can be quite aggressive. Because the cancer is so aggressive, anything left behind will spread rapidly without symptoms before it’s too late. To treat the aggressive cancer, doctors can use the pen to ensure they remove all of the cancerous tissue the first time and without question, heightening the patients overall survival rate.
References
https://www.today.com/health/cancer-pen-could-help-doctors-detect-tumors-more-quickly-t116041
https://www.masspecpen.com/technology.html
http://time.com/4928010/diagnose-cancer-pen/
