Now, researchers at the University of Texas at Austin and the Baylor College of Medicine have developed a device that could test tissue for cancer right in the operating room, leaving no question whether it should be removed or not.
The device is a pen-sized mass spectrometry device its developers are calling MasSpec Pen. The pen releases a droplet of water onto a tissue’s surface. The droplet attracts biomolecules from the tissue, and is then drawn back into the pen. The pen does a quick molecular analysis to determine whether the particles are cancerous or not. Within a few seconds, the surgeons know if they should remove the tissue.
“[With MasSpec Pen] we’re able to test tissue without taking tissue out,” says James Suliburk, a professor of surgery at Baylor who helped develop the device. “Right now, anything we want to test, we have to cut out. And we don’t want to cut out normal tissue. This allows us to be much more precise.”
The research team, led by UT chemistry professor Livia Schiavinato Eberlin, tested the MasSpec pen on tissues removed from 253 cancer patients. The pen gave a diagnosis in about 10 seconds, with more than 96 percent accuracy. It was also able to detect subtle changes in tissues in the margins between normal and cancerous tissues.
These results compare favorably with the standard technique for testing tissues during surgery. This technique, called a frozen section analysis, involves surgeons cutting out tissues and sending them to the pathology lab, where a pathologist looks at them under the microscope. This can take 30 minutes or more, during which time patients are lying on the operating table under anesthesia. While frozen section analysis is usually accurate, for some types of cancers it can give inconclusive or even false negative results.