• 1/1/2003
  • Los Angeles
  • David Brown
  • Dental Research Institute at UCLA

A tiny, silicon laboratory on a chip that could test patients for cancer and other harmful diseases while they wait to see the dentist is being developed by a multidisciplinary team of researchers at UCLA.

Painless, noninvasive and cost efficient, the device could detect evidence of cancers before even the best-trained clinician would spot them, according to David Wong, Director of the Dental Research Institute at UCLA and principal investigator.

Researchers at the Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science bring expertise in nanotechnology and microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) to the project. Chih-Ming Ho, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and Carlo Montemagno, who chairs the bioengineering department, are among a team of engineers. The project is funded by a $4.2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health.

“We are integrating microtechnology, nanotechnology and microbiology to build a new class of devices for pre-cancer and oral pathogen detection,” Montemagno said. “Because it would provide inexpensive, rapid, early detection of oral cancer and pathogen,” Wong said, “it is technology that could take us to the next level of patient care.” Early detection of cancer and pathogen is frequently cited as one of the best means of surviving cancer and oral infectious diseases.

“Patients are often uncomfortable having their blood drawn,” Wong said. The process requires trained technicians and exposes the patient and technician to possible contamination by infectious agents. This device would eliminate both the patient discomfort and danger to health care providers. In addition, having all the technology needed to perform the test on a single chip would reduce both the time and cost of analysis, making it available to a larger group of people.

According to Montemagno, sensors on the chip would test the patient’s saliva for certain protein markers that signal the possible presence of oral cancers or oral pathogens. The technology also opens the door to even more sophisticated screening, Montemagno said. Researchers have identified numerous protein markers whose presence may signal possible cancer. Current tests, however, are far from definitive. They only serve to alert physicians to the possible presence of cancer. Invasive procedures such as biopsies must be done to confirm the test results.

“In follow up studies,” Montemagno said, “we want to look at using saliva and other bodily fluids to do multidimensional screening.” By constructing a chip that will look for a “whole suite of biological markers,” Montemagno said, researchers may be able to identify certain collections of markers, or signatures, which can be compared against those in a database containing similar signatures, known to be associated with certain cancers at different stages of development. Collecting these signatures may allow them to make diagnoses with “a high level of accuracy — hopefully before we’re able to visualize them.” “We are hoping we will be able to look at all the clinical signatures — perhaps as many as 100 at a time — as cheaply as what it costs to do a single test today,” Montemagno said.

Wong described the cooperation between the dental and engineering schools on the project as a “perfect marriage.”

Also participating in the research are Benjamin Wu, assistant professor of bioengineering; Wenyuan Shi, professor and Fengxia Qi, assistant professor, both at the UCLA school of dentistry; Paul Denny, professor of dentistry at USC; Richard Jordan, associate professor at UCSF and Bruce Baum, branch chief at NIDCR.

Ho is also Associate Vice Chancellor for Research and holds the Ben Rich-Lockheed Martin Chair in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. Montemagno holds the Roy and Carol Doumani Chair in Biomedical Engineering.