![]() Proteases help cancer cells escape from tumors by cutting through the extracellular network of proteins that holds cells in place. Proteases are a type of enzyme that act as molecular scissors to cleave proteins and break them down into smaller components. The tests rely on nanoparticles that interact with tumor proteins called proteases. The study, conducted in collaboration with the laboratory of Tyler Jacks, was led by Ava Amini (Soleimany) ’16, a former graduate student from the Bhatia laboratory and postdoc Jesse Kirkpatrick, also from the Bhatia lab.įor several years, the Bhatia laboratory has been developing noninvasive urine tests for the detection of cancer, including colon, ovarian, and lung cancer. “With further development, the nanosensors could be used by clinicians to tailor treatments to a patient’s specific cancer, and to monitor cancer progression and treatment response, while researchers could use them to better understand the molecular biology of cancer and develop new tools to diagnose, track, and treat the disease.”īhatia is also a member of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and Institute for Medical Engineering and Science. and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Health Sciences and Technology, professor of electrical engineering the computer science, and senior author of the study. “We hope that this new suite of tools can be useful in the clinic and the lab alike,” says Sangeeta Bhatia, the John J. ![]() In work recently published in Nature Communications, researchers from the MIT Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research have developed a set of enzyme-targeting nanoscale tools to monitor cancer progression and treatment response in real time, map enzyme activity to precise locations within a tumor, and isolate relevant cell populations for analysis. Enzymes, which catalyze biochemical reactions inside cells, may give a clearer picture of which genes or proteins to target at a particular time. A protein could be present in a cancer cell as a bystander, for example, but not an active participant in its cellular transformations. However, these assays don’t necessarily show which proteins are active or relevant to tumor progression, or allow clinicians to noninvasively monitor the progress of the disease or its response to treatment. Sensitive tools for measuring protein or gene expression, even on the single cell level, have helped researchers understand the different cell types present in a tumor’s microenvironment and how this composition changes after treatments. ![]() Many of these changes are mediated by specific genes and proteins, working in tandem with other cellular processes, but the specifics vary from cancer type to cancer type, and even from patient to patient. Cancer is characterized by a number of key biological processes known as the “hallmarks of cancer,” which remodel cells and their immediate environment so that tumors can form, grow, and thrive.
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