Researchers use cell profiling to detect cancer
By IANSWednesday, January 26, 2011
WASHINGTON - Researchers are finding ways to tell a healthy cell from an abnormal one to identify and pre-empt cancer.
Though in its early stages, the research represents a new way of identifying cell abnormalities — whether cancer cells are aggressive and likely to spread throughout the body (metastasize), the journal Bulletin of Mathematical Biology reports.
Huseyin Coskun, visiting assistant professor of Maths at Ohio State University and project leader, sees his technique as a tool for also pathologists, who typically look at photographs of biopsied cells to identify cancer and judge how advanced they may be.
“A pathologist can diagnose cancer, but as far as predicting the future, they dont have many tools at their disposal — particularly if a cancer is in its early stages,” Coskun said, according to an Ohio university statement.
“Thats why I believe that one of the most important applications of this research is profiling cancer cells… If it looks like a cancer cell, and a particularly aggressive one, we would like to quantify how likely it is that the cancer cells will invade the body.”
In a very basic sense, diagnosing a “sick” cell such as a cancer cell by its appearance, motion, and behaviour is analogous to diagnosing a sick human, he said.
