Scientists in the city have devised what could a faster way to discover cancers and its stages while not taking tissue samples from the body.

The new technique, devised by UM-DAE Centre for Excellence in Basic Sciences (CBS), Kalina, and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Navy Nagar, uses laser beams to find tumour cells on the basis of the time they took to bond with one one another.

The team worked with cancerous cell lines of human and rat neural tumours fully grown in a laboratory.
While the typical minimum time for adhesion of tumour cells was 20 to 25 seconds, increasing to 45 seconds in some cases, two healthy cells take solely 5 seconds to bond.

At present, cancers are diagnosed and classified when cell or tissue samples taken through fine needle aspiration or a surgical biopsy are studied under a microscope.

“But these diagnostic methods have either limited accuracy or areasure} t i me consuming as the samples have to be labelled, stained and processed and involve an element of subjectivity, ” aforementioned Dr Uma Ladiwala, formerly of UM-DAE-CBS.

The recent study by a four-member team from CBS and TIFR used light from a centered light beam to entice a live tumour cell and produce it in close proximity to a different cell.

“While normal cells adhere faster, those that area unit unhealthy are slow t o stick t ogether. looking at the time cells take to adhere, {we can|we will|we are able to} see whether they are healthy or not,” stated prof Dee pak Mathur, atomic and molecular research laboratory, TIFR.

When the team used a chemical – all-trans retinoic acid (ATRA) – which may differentiate a a lot of malignant cancer cell to a less malignant one, and is being tried as a medical aid for cancers – on the cancer cells, the adhesion time was back to 5 to 7 seconds.

The scientists aforementioned the optical trappings technique can be used to classify the disease into varied stages, which is very important in treatment the disease.

“Optical trapping can be used as an alter native and objective diagnostic t echnique,” aforementioned Mathur.

“The study, which is at a very basic science level, needs to be taken forward and conducted on actual tumour cells from patients to prove its efficacy.”