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CANCER DIAGNOSIS

A ‘Swiss army knife’ probe for metastatic cancers

Nature Materials volume 20, pages 1312–1314 (2021)Cite this article

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A nanosensor probe that combines a tumour-targeting peptide, a diagnostic reporter and an imaging contrast agent enables early diagnosis, precision imaging, disease stratification and downstream therapeutic response monitoring of metastatic cancer.

Cancer is best described as a diverse collection of proliferative diseases that cause millions of deaths per year globally. While many new treatment approaches have helped to dramatically reduce the mortality caused by certain forms of cancer, there are many substantial hurdles that remain in our battle to effectively detect and treat these diseases. One of the major ongoing challenges is the development of sensitive and accurate tests that enable both early diagnosis and effective tracking of disseminated, metastatic disease. Of particular importance is the ability to continuously monitor disease progression as well as response to treatment to ensure effective therapeutic outcomes. For the majority of solid tumours, the most effective intervention is surgical removal of the diseased tissue. For this strategy to be effective, it is essential to be able to identify the presence and precise location of a lesion to enable biopsy and subsequent surgical removal. This has been facilitated by advanced technologies that allow physicians to directly ‘see’ tumours with high sensitivity and spatial resolution. In general, diagnosis and subsequent image-guided treatment strategies are facilitated by completely different tools. Typically, diagnostic assays focus on biomarkers that can be sensitively detected from easily obtained samples such as blood and urine whereas image-guided interventions depend on advanced instrumentation and contrast agents. The development of an increasing number of clinically approved diagnostic tests and imaging techniques has led to improved outcomes for patients with cancer, yet there is still a pressing need for more effective tools to enable the detection of early-stage metastatic tumours. In most cases, these small lesions cannot be effectively diagnosed or imaged due to limitations in current state-of-the-art technologies.

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Fig. 1: A multimodal imaging probe for detection and monitoring of metastatic cancers.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Departments of Pathology and Microbiology and Immunology, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA, USA

    Matthew Bogyo

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  1. Matthew Bogyo
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Correspondence to Matthew Bogyo.

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Competing interests

M.B. is a founder and consultant for Akrotome Imaging Inc. and is a consultant at Vergent Bioscience. Both companies are developing optical contrast agents that target lysosomal cysteine protease for imaging tumours during surgery.

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Bogyo, M. A ‘Swiss army knife’ probe for metastatic cancers. Nat. Mater. 20, 1312–1314 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-021-01105-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-021-01105-0

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