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Testing for Cancer With a Single Blood Sample
Startup Miroculus has developed a system that screens for dozens of cancers in 90 minutes

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/testing-cancer-simple-blood-test-180953070/

The Miroculus works in three steps: sample, react and analyze. First, a tech or doctor uses an off-the-shelf kit to extract RNA from a one-milliliter blood sample. Then, he or she places drops of the extracted sample into 96 wells on a prepared plate, known as a bioassay. Each well on the plate is pre-treated with its own bio-chemical mix that’s designed to react with a specific type of microRNA. The tech then places the plate inside a freestanding device that seals the plate off from light and keeps it at the proper temperature to incite a reaction. If a well glows, the specified mircoRNA is present.

The tech places a smartphone on top of the device so that its camera can peer inside. (Later versions of Miriam will have their own onboard computer.) Over the course of 60 minutes, the camera takes a series of pictures of the wells and tracks changes—including which wells are glowing, how frequently and how intensely. Data is sent to Miroculus’s cloud server for analysis. It compares those results with existing data to determine if any patterns are present that might indicate a particular type of cancer.

So far, the team has been able to identify lung, breast and pancreatic cancer in mice. The researchers are also participating in a clinical trial in Germany that includes 200 human breast cancer patients.

But Miroculus will have competition, eventually. A similar research effort in Japan, involving the country’s National Cancer Center, aims to bring a similar product to market within five years. The group's work will analyze blood samples from some 6,500 patients in order to spot the microRNA signatures of 13 types of cancer.

While these methods show promise, experts do caution that we still need more data to make microRNA diagnosis as foolproof as Miroculus plans. Simple things like a common cold or taking an aspirin can affect the presence of microRNA in the blood, Muneesh Tewari of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center explained to Wired. Therefore, building out Miroculus’s database of reference points will be just as important as the accuracy of the bioassay itself.