The OSUCCC – James is focusing on three key areas within the university’s Time and Change Campaign: immunooncology, cancer engineering and the development of state-of-the-art facilities.
Continue reading to learn how engineering can play a role in the fight against cancer.
Cancer Engineering: Improving Cancer Diagnostics Through Microfluidics
Hope for Sarcoma Patients
Sarcoma is a particularly deadly form of cancer. Of the 13,130 people who received a sarcoma diagnosis in 2020, more than half are not expected to survive. One reason sarcoma claims so many lives is that it forms in soft tissue, where it can frequently grow undetected. By the time it becomes visible, the disease has often spread to other areas of the body, making it very difficult to successfully treat.
Microfluidics: New Blood Test May Save Lives
Microfluidics is a field in which the precise control and manipulation of fluid is applied to practical situations. A new blood-based test developed at Ohio State offers hope for early sarcoma diagnosis that is less invasive and less expensive than current diagnostic options that have been used for decades.
What the Blood Test Means for Patients
“After a long operation to remove a confirmed tumor, it is very difficult in scans to differentiate tumor recurrence from post-surgical scarring,” says OSUCCC director Raphael E. Pollock, MD, PhD, FACS, a sarcoma specialist. “But if you can detect something a tumor releases into the bloodstream, that provides you with a heightened index of suspicion of what you may be seeing on a scan.
“Instead of relying on repeat scans over months to determine size increase or decrease, we can potentially identify recurrence at a very early point. We’re very excited about the potential.”
Ohio State Team Leads the New Research
Pollock is interested in exosomes, or particles that are extruded by most cells into the blood stream. Exosomes contain nucleic acids and protein cargoes, some of which may serve as biomarkers to help with early detection of sarcomas.
Pollock turned to microfluidics expert Shaurya Prakash, PhD, associate professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at The Ohio State University College of Engineering, for a cancer engineering partnership to more effectively isolate sarcoma-derived circulating exosomes and determine if their cargo could help identify undetected sarcomas elsewhere in the body.
Prakash and Pollock developed a microfluidic prototype for extracting exosomes from the blood. The new technology has been shown to enhance biomarker detection at a fraction of the cost and time compared to current best methodologies.
The team is refining the prototype; Pollock and Prakash are working toward biomarker-validating clinical trials. Microfluidic approaches can also be applied to many other areas of cancer diagnostics, including other sarcomas, leukemia, and lung, prostate and gastrointestinal cancers.
The Center for Cancer Engineering
Microfluidics is one of multiple projects underway at the Center for Cancer Engineering, a collaboration between the College of Engineering and the OSUCCC – James. The center seeks to improve patient lives by integrating innovative engineering technologies and data analytics with cancer science to enhance cancer prevention, diagnosis and treatment.
“It’s been a total partnership,” Pollock says. “None of this would have happened without the mutual interest and opportunities to communicate about possibilities.”