What if you could plaster cancer cells with glowing "Here We Are" signs, so surgeons could be confident that they'd removed every last speck of a tumour?
That's what Haiying Liu has in mind for his new fluorescent probe.
"Doctors need to pinpoint cancer tissue, but that can be hard," said Liu, a chemistry professor at Michigan Technological University.
Test-tube cancer antibodies coupled with special enzymes have been used to highlight malignancies during surgery, since they bind to tumour cells, but they have a drawback.
"They are colourless," he said. "You can label something, but if you can't see it, that's a problem." Now Liu has developed a probe that could cling to those enzyme-coated antibodies and make them glow under fluorescent light.
The journal Analytic Chimica Acta recently published the research.
The fluorescent probe has some appealing medical properties:
The probe bonds to an enzyme that has a long track record in medical science.
Beta-galactosidase has been widely used to label a variety of antibodies that have been used in multiple medical applications, including cancer surgery. "If we could make beta-galactosidase glow brightly during surgery, it could play a major role in improving outcomes," Liu said.
In the new paper, Liu's team showed how the probe bonds to beta-galactocidase in a solution of living cells.
In the future, they would like to collaborate with medical researchers to refine their system, incorporating enzyme-labelled cancer antibodies and developing it as a guide for surgeons.
"Doctors want to remove all the cancer, but they also don't want to cut too much," Liu said. "We want to make their job a little easier."