便携式的癌症检测装置

Now from the Boston Museum of Science, Sci-tech today on NECN.

Now in Sci-tech today a device that could make cancer testing more available worldwide. It’s called the Nuclear Magnetic Resonance System and it’s actually been around for decades, so what’s new? A Harvard researcher has found a way to shrink it from 250 pounds to this device which weighs less than a quarter of a pound. Nano technology correspondent Alex Fiorentino joins us live from the Museum of Science in Boston.

Welcome Alex, how could this device help fight cancer?

-Well, Chad this is a device that detects cancer in the blood, so tumors release certain cancer markers into the blood and by detecting them we can do a much better job of diagnosing and monitoring cancer. So unfortunately the techniques we use to do this test can be pretty inconvenient so they often involve a laboratory equipment that’s very expensive and isn’t available to everyone. So for today what we are looking at is a different way of testing the blood for cancer called Nuclear Magnetic Resonance or NMR. And basically what NMR use is it’s like a MRI scan, excepting instead of scanning the whole body, you are only scanning a tiny sample of someone’s blood.

-All right, so this is based on a MRI scan but those aren't exactly cheap or convenient, how is this NMR different?

-Ur, well, in many cases actually not that much different so I have a picture here of an actual commercial MRI machine and you can see that it is pretty bulky device and it's also quite expensive, so this really doesn’t help make this testing more available to people. However, so, what we are talking about here is a scientist’s name, Nan , who’s an electronic engineer from Harvard University, and Nason saw the real problem with these big MRI devices was the giant magnet inside that. So there are two main components in every MRI machine, a magnet which poses on your blood sample with a magnetic field and a transceiver which zaps the sample and receives back the signals to detect what’s in the sample. So normally the magnet is by far the biggest and most expensive piece of an MRI machine and so a real MRI magnet would be many, many times bigger than this, and it would weight hundreds of pounds.

 But Nan and his adviser Donhe Kim realized that these big expensive magnets really won’t necessary, a tiny magnet would work just as well, you’ll just need the other component, the transceiver to be sensible enough. So Nan went to work on this, he is an electrical engineer so he completely redesigned the MR transceiver and within a few months he created this which is basically the same device, it’s got a magnet and a transceiver, but this is 1200 times smaller, 150 times more sensitive and 1400 times cheaper than a commercial MR machine.

-Well, that’s pretty amazing, so it just reworking the transceiver that allow it to shrink that device down to what you just showed us.

-Yeah, Pardon me, Chad.

-Yeah, go ahead.

-I was just gonna say that… So, shrinking that down was a huge part what made this possible, but also Doctor, Excuse me, Nan, borrowed a technique from some other researchers at Harvard, and that was to add magnetic nano particles to the blood samples so to explain why exactly who’d wanna do that. Let’s take a look at this model I have right here, so imagine that this red area is your blood sample and you’d add to it these magnetic nano particles, although in reality the magnetic nano particles are hundreds of thousands times smaller than this, but if there is no evidence of cancer in your blood sample then the nano particles just scattered around. But if you do have a cancer marker present in the blood then the nano particles are attracted to it, they stick to it and they form this cluster around it. This cluster is very, very easy to detect using an NMR . So what we done here is make this test much more sensitive, instead of trying find this one little cancer marker, you are able to find a big magnetic cluster that’s surrounding it.

-All right, Alex that’s a fascinating stuff. Alex Fiorentino thanks for joining us. Live  today from the Museum of Science

-Thanks for having me, Chad