Designing better cancer drugs has just been simplified, thanks to the following discovery. In a major breakthrough, David Nolte a Purdue physicist has introduced a technology to identify motion inside three-dimensional tumor spheroids. Termed as the Holographic Tissue Dynamics Spectroscopy, this technology can supposedly aid in coming up with improved medications for cancer patients.
The newly developed technique may allow doctors to have a look into the cells through holography and lasers. It apparently measures living motion inside a cell by picking up all the activity and looking at the way the cell modifies its activities in response to applied drugs. In the initial process of the research, Nolte’s holography technology was employed to point out tumor tissue in three dimensions.
“After making the hologram, we use spectroscopy to measure the time-dependent changes in the hologram,” David Nolte said. “Fluctuation spectroscopy breaks down the changes into different frequencies, and we can tell how a cell’s membranes, mitochondria, nucleus and even cell division respond to drugs. We measure the frequency of light fluctuations as a function of time after a drug is applied.”
Digital holograms of the tumor are made that can presumably grow up to one millimeter. Such a holographic technique employs lasers to enable physicians see the tumor not just on the surface, but in greater detail. The tissue dynamics spectroscopy put to use in Nolte’s technology seemingly produces an image revealing alterations occurring within the cells. As a result, a colorful frequency-versus-time spectrogram may be achieved that signifies a novel voice-print of the drug used on the cells.
People probably have different spectrograms, but with similarities in specific classes. Analyzing the way cell motion responds to drugs can help in providing personalized treatments for battling tumors and other tissue diseases. Due to its high-throughput aspect, the technology capacitates manufacturers to place a different tumor into 384 plates, test 384 different drug compounds and create 384 spectrograms in a period of six hours.
The research is published in the Journal of Biomedical Optics.