Translational Medicine: Promising New Technology for Diagnosis of Breast Cancer

October 7, 2009 -  An interdisciplinary collaboration between Dr. Bob Casper's lab at the Lunenfeld with Dr. Aaron Wheeler's team at U of Toronto has resulted in the development of an exciting new approach for measuring estrogen levels in clinical samples. The "Lab on a Chip" approach employs silicon wafer-based electronics technology to extract estogen from as little as 1 microliter of sample - 1000x less material than typically required. The study was published in the inaugural issue of Science Translational Medicine, an off-shoot of Science magazine that focuses on translational research. The study's lead author, Noha Mousa, a PhD student supervised by Casper, spent considerable time in the Wheeler lab developing the technology. The research is applicable to miniaturization of a variety of biological assays and could lead to more sensitive diagnostic tests.