Non-invasive cancer detection

The technique, published in The Journal of Nuclear Medicine, enables researchers to visualise tumour activity at the molecular level.

‘We hope this technique may be helpful for the early detection of disease,’ said Juergen K Willmann, MD, lead author of the study and assistant professor of radiology at Stanford University School of Medicine.

‘It may help save lives by finding cancer — such as breast, ovarian or pancreatic cancer — in the very early stages, when it is still curable.’

In the study, researchers intravenously injected microbubbles — gas-filled spheres small enough to travel through vessels — into mice with cancers.

The microbubbles, which were paired with a new peptide (a molecule that consists of a chain of amino acids) were designed to travel through the vascular system and attach to integrin — a well-characterised molecular marker that acts as a ’red flag’ for tumour vessel growth, or angiogenesis.

Tumour vessel growth occurs when active tumour cells create certain pathways to provide the tumour with a sufficient supply of oxygen, nutrients and other factors needed for growth.