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Researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center have developed a new technology that could theoretically detect cancer early on.

The technology is based on the reception of nucleic acids, or “disease biomarkers,” as these acids are the essential ingredient to all living organisms.

“We envision this as a potential first-line, noninvasive diagnostic to detect anything from cancer to the Ebola virus,” says Adam R. Hall, Ph.D., adding “Although we are certainly at the early stages of the technology, eventually we could perform the test using a few drops of blood from a simple finger prick.” Hall is an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center and the lead author of the study.

The findings were first published in the online journal Nano Letters.

Nucleic acids are extremely varied in shape and size, but are essentially chains of bases that can consist of just a few to millions of elements. The ordering of these acids is directly related to their function, and so the Wake Forest researchers are basing their findings on the assumption that cell and tissue activity can be predicted solely by nucleic acids.

“Scientists have studied microRNA biomarkers for years, but one problem has been accurate detection because they are so short, many technologies have real difficulty identifying them,” Hall says.

One family of nucleic acids are known as microRNAs. These are about 20 bases long, but can potentially signal diseases like cancer.

As a post at Controlled Environments Magazine by Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center staff points out, “In the new technique, nanotechnology is used to determine whether a specific target nucleic acid sequence exists within a mixture, and to quantify it if it does through a simple electronic signature. ‘If the sequence you are looking for is there, it forms a double helix with a probe we provide and you see a clear signal. If the sequence isn’t there, then there isn’t any signal,’ Hall says. ‘By simply counting the number of signals, you can determine how much of the target is around.’”

The team involved in the study first demonstrated that their technology could target a specific sequence of nucleic acids, “and then applied their technique to one particular microRNA (mi-R155) known to indicate lung cancer in humans.”

This showed that the new approach had the ability to expound the tiny amounts of microRNAs found in patients.

“Next steps will involve expanding the technology to study clinical samples of blood, tissue, or urine,” the Wake Forest team writes.