UH Researchers Nab New NIH Grant to Construct, Test Cancer Tool
Device will be sensitive enough to detect disease on single molecule level

By Erin D. McKenzie, Engineering Communications

October 12, 2009

Litvinov

Willson

A team of University of Houston researchers is among a select few to be awarded a competitive grant from the National Institutes of Health to create a technology that more efficiently identifies the presence of cancer in even the smallest of body fluid samples.

The team led by Dmitri Litvinov, professor of electrical and computer engineering, will use the $1 million grant not only to construct, but also to test their biosensor’s ability to spot cancer protein biomarkers for Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia—a blood and bone marrow cancer. The device will use magnetic nanotechnology to locate these biomarkers, which are elevated in patients with the disease, on a single molecule level.

“A technology that uses smaller samples that can be taken from patients’ less invasively and directly detect these miniscule biomarkers could cut back on the complicated steps doctors use now that often lead to errors and false positives,” said Litvinov. “This biosensor could do the same job faster, cheaper and with fewer problems.”

Under the Challenge Grant in Health and Science Research Program, launched with stimulus money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, NIH received some 20,000 applications for funding. Less than 2 percent who applied actually earned one of the grants—designed to further biomedical and behavioral research.

“This was the only challenge grant received by researchers at the college and across the university,” said Fritz Claydon, associate dean for administration and research at the UH Cullen College of Engineering. “This represents an outstanding achievement for us, especially in the university’s push to become a Tier One research institution. Producing pioneering biomedical-related discoveries is among UH’s top Tier One research initiatives, and receipt of this grant certainly shows our faculty are competitive on this level.”

Throughout the course of the two-year grant, Litvinov, along with co-investigators, Richard Willson, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering; T. Randall Lee, Cullen Distinguished Professor of Chemistry; and Chung-Che “Jeff” Chang, associate member of the Methodist Hospital Research Institute, will test the technologies potential for sensing these often hard-to-detect biomarkers.

Indicating the presence of cancer on the cellular level, biomarkers are tiny and generally only present in biological samples in low levels.

But UH researchers plan to capitalize on dramatic advances in the data storage industry to develop a device so sensitive it can detect these biomarkers even if just a single molecule is present. More specifically, they will look for biomarkers of microRNA to assist doctors in providing better diagnosis and prognosis for Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia.

Litvinov, a leading expert in magnetic hard disk drives, will adapt the readers used to translate the information contained in ever-shrinking magnetic domains stored on a hard disk into sensors that will help, in part, to detect these microRNA biomarkers.

The sensors will work together with special magnetic particles—hundreds of times smaller than the diameter of a human hair—that will be developed by Lee. These magnetic particles will bind with these biomarkers and allow them to be tracked. If these specific cancer biomarkers are, indeed, present in a sample they will bond with the magnetic particles and the sensor will be able to detect them.

“If you can use this reader to read 100 nanometer domains as they fly by at fast speeds than maybe they can detect tiny magnetic nanoparticles too,” Willson explains.

Once the device and the particles are developed, the team plans to have Chang carry out real-world tests using it. Their results could change the way many samples are tested.

“The way they evaluate biological samples for the presence of cancer now is by looking at it under a microscope, which relies heavily on the experience of the person evaluating the sample and the quality of the sample,” Litvinov said. “Here, the idea is to automate the process and make it foolproof and eliminate the human-error factor without resorting to surgery.”

While this current process takes days, these researchers’ tool could produce more accurate, cheaper results within a matter of hours.

Beyond their work using funding from this grant, their hope is to later expand this device’s capabilities and use it as an early detection tool for everything from HIV to Alzheimer’s.