Microchip offers hope of better prostate cancer screening

Sunnybrook's Dr. Robert Nam and the University of Toronto's Dr. Shana Kelley have struck a partnership that may transform prostate cancer screening as we know it.

Backed by a grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Drs. Nam and Kelley, along with leading Canadian experts in nanotechnology and bio-analytical chemistry, will refine Dr. Kelley's cancer-detecting microchip technology to develop a prostate cancer screening device that is fast, inexpensive and non-invasive.

Dr. Kelley's research on the technology turned heads in 2009 when she published an article in Nature Nanotechnology. And when Dr. Nam approached Dr. Kelley - a biochemistry and pharmaceutical sciences professor - about collaborating, they each found a match.

"Boom–it just fell into place," says Dr. Nam, a Sunnybrook Research Institute, clinical epidemiologist and head of Sunnybrook's Odette Cancer Centre's Genitourinary Cancer Care Team.

Dr. Kelley's technology consists of finely structured electrode probes on a chip of silicon. The chip's sensitivity is a major breakthrough, but a remaining challenge is specificity: it must distinguish cancer cells from a complex background of molecular material.

To detect prostate cancer reliably, and to establish whether it is slow growing or aggressive, the researchers will need a well-developed panel of prostate cancer-specific biomarkers. Dr. Nam will look for these using Sunnybrook Research Institute's DNA sequence analyzer and Sunnybrook's tumour bank. Meanwhile, Dr. Kelley and others will streamline the chip-based nanotechnology.