BY DAVID BROWN
UCLA Today
Waiting for the dentist — time typically
spent shuffling through old magazines while anxiously watching
the clock — might someday save your life.
In an innovative pairing of talents, dental
and engineering researchers at UCLA have combined their expertise
to develop a tiny silicon laboratory on a chip that could test
dental patients for cancer and other diseases while they wait
to see the doctor.
Painless, noninvasive and cost-efficient, the
device could detect evidence of cancers before even the best-trained
clinician would spot them, according to David Wong, professor
and director of the Dental Research Institute and principal
investigator.
Researchers at the Henry Samueli School of
Engineering and Applied Science are bringing their expertise
in nanotechnology and microelectromechanical systems (MEMS)
to the project, which is funded by a $4.2-million grant from
the National Institutes of Health. Chih-Ming Ho, professor of
mechanical and aerospace engineering, and Carlo Montemagno,
chair of the bioengineering department, are part of that team
of engineers.
“This NIH project is another example of
how the collaborations between UCLA dentists, scientists and
engineers can improve our health,” said Ho, who is also
associate vice chancellor for research and holds the Ben Rich-Lockheed
Martin Chair in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. Montemagno
holds the Roy and Carol Doumani Chair in Biomedical Engineering.
“We are integrating microtechnology,
nanotechnology and microbiology to build a new class of devices
for pre-cancer and oral pathogen detection,” Monte-magno
said.
“Because it would provide inexpensive,
rapid, early detection of oral cancer and pathogens,”
Wong said, “it is technology that could take us to the
next level of patient care.”
And it would be an improvement over the current
method. “Patients are often uncomfortable having their
blood drawn,” Wong said. That process requires trained
technicians and exposes both them and the patient to possible
contamination by infectious agents.
The new device would eliminate the discomfort
and the danger and, since everything needed for the test is
on a single chip, it would reduce time and cost of analysis,
making it available to a larger group of people.
Sensors on the chip would test the patient’s
saliva for certain protein markers that may signal the possible
presence of oral cancers or other pathogens, Montemagno explained.
The technology also opens the door to even more-sophisticated
screening.
Researchers have identified numerous protein
markers that may signal possible cancer. Current tests, however,
are far from definitive. Although they can alert physicians
to the possible presence of cancer, more invasive procedures
such as biopsies must be done to confirm the test results.
By constructing a chip that will look for a
“whole suite of biological markers,” Montemagno
said, researchers may be able to identify certain collections
of markers, or signatures, by comparing them in a database to
signatures known to be associated with certain cancers at different
stages of development. Collecting these signatures may allow
them to make diagnoses with “a high level of accuracy
— hopefully before we’re able to visualize them,”
Montemagno said.
“In follow-up studies, we want to look
at using saliva and other bodily fluids to do multidimensional
screening,” he said. “We are hoping we will be able
to look at all the clinical signatures — perhaps as many
as 100 at a time — as cheaply as what it costs to do a
single test today.”
