Magnet for Cancer Detection

 

 

 Professor Shan Wang, at Stanford’s department of materials science and engineering, has developed a silicon chip array that has 64 magnetic “spin valves,” coated with different antibodies, that capture proteins from a blood sample, that also had antibody-coated magnet nanoparticles in the serum.  A magnetic field then captured the nanoparticles and measure the cancer biomarkers.  This “MagArray” proved to be significantly more sensitive than existing systems that rely on fluorescent tagged antibodies.  MORE   

Image Credit: Sebastian Osterfeld (top); PNAS (bottom) and Technology Review