Letter abstract
Nature Nanotechnology 2, 780 - 783 (2007)
Published online: 2 December 2007 | doi:10.1038/nnano.2007.388
Subject Categories: Nanomedicine | Structural properties
Nanomechanical analysis of cells from cancer patients
Sarah E. Cross1,2,4, Yu-Sheng Jin3,4, Jianyu Rao3,4 & James K. Gimzewski1,2,4
Abstract
Change in cell stiffness is a new characteristic of cancer cells that affects the way they spread1, 2. Despite several studies on architectural changes in cultured cell lines1, 3, no ex vivo mechanical analyses of cancer cells obtained from patients have been reported. Using atomic force microscopy, we report the stiffness of live metastatic cancer cells taken from the body (pleural) fluids of patients with suspected lung, breast and pancreas cancer. Within the same sample, we find that the cell stiffness of metastatic cancer cells is more than 70% softer, with a standard deviation over five times narrower, than the benign cells that line the body cavity. Different cancer types were found to display a common stiffness. Our work shows that mechanical analysis can distinguish cancerous cells from normal ones even when they show similar shapes. These results show that nanomechanical analysis correlates well with immunohistochemical testing currently used for detecting cancer.
- Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of California, Los Angeles, California 90095, USA
- California NanoSystems Institute, University of California, Los Angeles, California 90095, USA
- Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles, California 90095, USA
- These authors contributed equally to this work.
Correspondence to: Jianyu Rao3,4 e-mail: JRao@mednet.ucla.edu
Correspondence to: James K. Gimzewski1,2,4 e-mail: gim@chem.ucla.edu
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