Cancer detector

A team from UCL has developed a new medical device which will make the early detection of breast cancer more cost effective and easier to administer.

The team - which recently won a prestigious Brian Mercer Feasibility Award from the Royal Society - plans to use magnetic nanoparticles and an extremely sensitive magnetometer called the ‘HistoMag’ to detect cancerous cells in samples of breast tissue.

'Each year 35,000 women are diagnosed with breast cancer in the UK and the testing programme is a massive undertaking,' said Prof Quentin Pankhurst of the London Centre for Nanotechnology and the UCL Department of Physics & Astronomy.

Until now, pathologists had to stain tissue samples with brown dyes to help them determine whether they were normal or cancerous.  All of the results are open to interpretation and each test has to be individually checked by a specialist, which makes the process extremely time consuming.

'At UCL we’ve been working in the relatively new area of biomagnetics to develop a technique which provides more quantitative and reliable results, whilst also enabling pathologists to identify abnormal tissue sections much more quickly,' added Prof Pankhurst.