Cells in your body are like construction
workers building an apartment building
they construct and grow on a fibrous
scaffold shown here in pink that's very
similar to the scaffold used to support
a building during construction but
unfortunately construction sites are
often targets for vandalism unruly
teenagers who come in the night and tear
down the scaffold just for the sake of
wreaking havoc in the construction site
of the body these vandals are cancer
cells except instead of tearing down the
scaffold they add more increasing the
stiffness to promote their growth over
the growth of healthy cells but which
comes first the cancer cells or the
increased scaffold stiffness it turns
out that the answer actually is both
recent studies have shown that
increasing scaffold stiffness can be
used as a predictive factor of where
cancer is likely to spread within the
body if we could detect microscale
variations in scaffold stiffness we
could predict where cancer is likely to
develop and stop it before a tumor
actually forms. Most tumors occur within
a few millimetres of the surface of the
tissue that surrounds your organs but
this is still too deep for light to
reach which makes it really difficult
for doctors to image cancer inside the
body at the cellular level they
typically get around this by removing
some tissue from the body and screening
that for cancer but this severely limits
the area over which we can search and
small high-risk regions are easily
missed. You may have heard of the
microscope in a needle project it's a
well known research program here at UWA
for my PhD I'm developing a new
embodiment of the microscope in a needle
which can measure variations in
mechanical properties millimeters deep
in tissue without removing anything from
the body. Using fiber optics inside of a
hypodermic needle we can deliver light
deeper in tissue than it would be able
to reach from the surface we vibrate the
needle to induce a small amount of
motion in the tissue and we measure the
displacement with nanoscale precision by
measuring how much the tissue moves in
response to this needle we can generate
images
of the mechanical properties of the
surrounding area which makes it which
make it much easier to see precancerous
regions. This approach is muscle much
less invasive than traditional
techniques and the added ability to
search over a larger area drastically
decreases the likelihood that small cancerous
regions will be missed. This will
ultimately lead to significantly improve
patient outcomes because we'll be able
to detect cancer sooner and with fewer
less invasive surgeries it would be like
putting up motion detectors around your
construction site to stop the Vandals
before they can cause any serious damage.
And before you know it the construction
site will be secured and the body will
be cancer free thank you.
