As summer approaches, it’s time to start stocking up on sunscreen. Skin cancer is the most common, but highly treatable, cancer, especially if detected early.
For everyone concerned with his or her own risk of skin cancer, there will soon be a quick, non-invasive test for diagnosis. Rather than taking a biopsy, which must be examined by a pathologist, the new system involves simply looking through a multiphoton microscope at the patient’s skin and determining whether it is cancerous or not.
An international group of scientists and engineers did the research and reported their findings in the November 2016 issue of Science Translational Medicine. The team found that mitochondria behave very differently in healthy versus cancerous tissue.
Mitochondria, small organelles that produce energy in cells, use a molecule called nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NADH) to produce energy for the cell. Because NADH naturally fluoresces without injecting any dye or contract, it can be observed using multiphoton microscopy to provide diagnostically useful information about the organization of the mitochondria in skin cells.
Dr. Irene Georgakoudi, senior author on the paper, noted that the multiphoton microscope uses lasers to obtain very high-resolution images of individual cells without having to slice the tissue physically. Normal cells in the mitochondria spread throughout the cell in a web-like pattern. Mitochondria in cancerous skin cells form clumps or clusters typically at the center of the cell along the border of the nucleus.
The small study tested 10 patients with skin cancer and four who did not have skin cancer. The imaging technique results were compared to the traditional biopsy results. The results demonstrated that the imaging technique correctly identified skin cancer in all 10 cancer patients, and made no false diagnoses in the four individuals without skin cancer.
Georgakoudi is hopeful that the test could be routinely used in doctor’s offices within five years as long as the price tag for the laser used in the microscope decreases. "Less-expensive lasers are on the horizon," concludes Georgakoudi. "However, this approach would enable a doctor to make a quick diagnosis and begin treatment immediately, which could ultimately lower health care costs associated with these very common cancers."
Materials provided by National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering.
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