The sooner a disease is diagnosed, the more likely it is to be well managed or cured. The challenge to finding a disease early is that most of us don’t seek treatment until we have symptoms, which means the disease has already progressed.
But breakthroughs in nanobiotechnology techniques mean that in five years we will be able to examine and filter bodily fluids for tiny bioparticles that reveal signs of disease like cancer before we have any symptoms, letting us know immediately if we should consult a doctor.
Information about the state of our health can be extracted from tiny bioparticles in bodily fluids such as saliva, tears, blood, urine and sweat called exosomes. These particles were first discovered in the 1980s as vesicles secreted by immature red blood cells, but later they were found to be secreted in all cell types. Scientists discovered that exosomes carry information from the cell they originated from, including proteins, RNA (ribonucleic acid) and DNA. Because the state of the originating cell can be inferred from these exosomes, they have been considered as potential biomarkers of disease for more than a decade. Besides cancer, exosomes are being considered as insightful for central nervous system diseases (Alzheimer’s, multiple sclerosis and stroke), renal fibrosis and cardiovascular disease.
At the moment it’s difficult to capture and analyse these bioparticles as they are thousands of times smaller than the diameter of a strand of human hair. But at IBM Research we are developing lab-on-a-chip nanotechnology that can separate and isolate bioparticles down to 20 nanometres in diameter, a scale that gives access to DNA, viruses and exosomes. These particles could be analysed to potentially reveal signs of disease even before we have symptoms.
This technique is known as liquid biopsy, designed to be more accessible, comfortable and convenient than the traditional tissue biopsy or cancer screening techniques many of us are familiar with. The goal is to shrink down to a single silicon chip all of the processes necessary to analyse a disease that would normally be carried out in a full-scale biochemistry lab.
In the future, the lab-on-a-chip technology could be packaged in a convenient handheld device to allow people to measure the presence of biomarkers found in small amounts of bodily fluids, streaming this information into the cloud from the convenience of their home. There it could be combined with health data from other IoT-enabled devices, like sleep monitors and smartwatches, and analysed by artificial intelligence systems for insights. When taken together, this dataset will give us an in-depth view of our health and alert us to the first signs of trouble, helping to stop disease before it progresses.
The next five years will see significant advances in the application and development of this technology. Practically speaking, it’s difficult to say confidently that it will be in widespread use in our homes by 2022, but based on current developments and advances in research, this innovation will likely be used by physicians in some capacity by that time.
The vision for this technology is that it could be used anywhere in the world, from remote rural locations to developed urban areas. To reach the people who need it most, the technology must be affordable. Putting these capabilities on a regular silicon chip means they can be manufactured inexpensively. The challenge will be to do so at a scale that can reach people worldwide while also educating users and physicians on its benefits.
As we all know, treating a disease like cancer is expensive, and rising. According to Cancer Research UK, there was a 10% annual increase in cancer drugs prices from 1995-2013 and many new immunotherapies have price tags of over £100,000 per patient per year. When your doctor can diagnose cancer in its early stages, your odds of financial hardship – and death – decrease significantly. By making it nearly as easy to detect early stage cancer as taking a home pregnancy test, you could argue that we will change the economics of cancer. If all goes well, we may greatly diminish the physical and emotional toll of this terrible disease for future generations.
Gustavo Stolovitzky is program director of Translational Systems Biology and Nanobiotechnology at IBM Research
Soon we"ll be able to spot diseases like cancer before we even feel sick
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