Toronto researchers have developed a portable device they say will accurately diagnose prostate cancer in 30 minutes.

The microchip technology, created by a pair of University of Toronto scientists, will be able to determine the severity of the tumours through a simple urine sample and produce quick diagnosis with no need for painful biopsies.

Now heading into the engineering stage, a BlackBerry-sized device should be available for doctors' use within two to three years and could be tuned to detect a broad range of cancers and infectious ailments, the researchers say.

"The goal would be to produce a result.....while you're sitting in the waiting room," says engineering professor Ted Sargent, holder of the U of T's Canada Research Chair in Nanotechnology.

A paper on the work was published today in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

The device uses a fingertip-sized microchip - fitted with nanometre-sized meshing - programmed to detect DNA sequences and proteins that are uniquely produced by specific cancers or pathogens.

These "biomarkers" would be drawn from urine or blood samples by molecular "bait" placed on the meshed surface of the chips.

"We simply put a sample on the chip and we have a nice small chip reader that then analyses it and tells you what markers are in the sample," says Shana Kelley, a U of T pharmacology professor and study co-author.

Detected markers can tell you not only which kind of cancer is present, but also the stage and severity the tumour has attained.

"That's very important to be able to do that, because cancers are actually a bunch of different diseases with different levels of aggressiveness," Kelley says.

"And particularly in prostate cancer, there are very non-aggressive forms.....that you simply want to leave alone," she says.

Kelley says the technology could herald an age of surgery-free diagnosis for cancer patients.

"The real drive is towards non-invasive diagnostics so we can just screen people without having to take parts of their organs in order to do it," Kelley says.

Dr. Tom Hudson, scientific director of the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, says the study is "proof of principle" that it is possible to have a quick, affordable technology that can test for many different cancer biomarkers at once.

"This is a critical step," he says. "They have shown you can detect this gene mutation (for prostate cancer). And if you extrapolate that you can do it for one gene, you could probably do it for 100 or 1,000."

Hudson says scientists face three major challenges in using biomarkers to more accurately and quickly detect cancer - a necessary step towards more personalized, targeted cancer therapies.

Scientists around the world are working hard on the first challenge, which is identifying biomarkers for specific cancers, and testing those markers' usefulness in diagnosing cancer in patients. Some 1,000 biomarkers have been found, but Hudson says only nine of those have been validated so far in the clinic.

Until now, solutions for the other two challenges - finding a way to test for many different biomarkers at once, and developing a cost-effective technology to do it - have lagged behind the biomarker search.

"They (Kelley and Sargent) are working on part two and three of this equation," says Hudson, who cautioned the device was still a long way off from being a staple in doctor's offices. "How we make these (biomarker) tests happen in the clinic or in the clinical lab really needed some advances in technology. And they've done all the proof of principles here for a technology that's going to work."

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For the initial work, Sargent and Kelley looked at prostate cancer, which has a set of signature biomarkers that have been shown in many studies to accurately portray the existence and severity of that disease.

The pair showed that the chips were well able to pick up these makers in the miniscule concentrations that would typically be found in the urine of prostate cancer patients.

Currently prostate cancers are diagnosed using what is known as a prostate specific antigen or PSA test.

The test has proven unreliable in determining the severity of the ailment, however, and has resulted in a large number of unnecessary or overly aggressive surgeries.

But even now, Kelley says, they are shifting the technology's sights on to other cancers and ailments.

"We focused in on prostate cancer in our first set of studies, but we've already done now a little bit of work with head and neck cancer," Kelley says.

"But really any cancer where there is an established molecular profile, we should be able to pick up using this device," she says.

A six-inch cube in its current configuration, Kelley says the device can be miniaturized in the development and manufacturing process down to basic BlackBerry size.

Sargent says he envisions the devices being a commonplace tool in doctors' offices around the world. Along with the handheld detector itself, physicians would be provided with a binder full of chips that had been tuned to detect different cancers and diseases.

"Say you were looking for H1N1 (influenza) or some dangerous infectious agent, there could be chips specific to those," he says.

"You would just insert the proper one," he says.

As more disease biomarkers are discovered, chips could be easily programmed to find and detect them at the low concentrations they typically attain in blood or urine.