Shuming Nie, a professor in the Walter H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, has worked with a team of researchers to determine gold’s potential as a tumor cell detector for patients with head and neck cancer.  The detection of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) is an emerging technique that allows oncologists to monitor patients with cancer for metastasis or to evaluate the progress of their treatment. The gold particles, which are embedded with dyes allowing their detection by laser spectroscopy, could enhance this technique’s specificity by reducing the number of false positives. 

To overcome the challenges associated with CTC detection, including the false identification of white blood cells as tumor cells, researchers needed to formulate a method to draw the gold particles to tumor cells rather than the antibodies of white blood cells.  Through their research, Professor Nie and his team show that polymer-coated and dye-studded gold particles, directly linked to a growth factor peptide rather than an antibody, can detect CTCs in the blood.  The gold nanoparticles are linked to a specific growth factor, whose counterpart is over-produced on the surfaces of several types of tumor cells. 

“Nanoparticles could be instrumental in modifying the process so that circulating tumor cells can be detected without separating the tumor cells from normal blood cells,” Nie says. “We’ve demonstrated that one tumor cell out of approximately one to ten million normal cells can be detected this way.”