Scientists in the U.S. have shown how measuring changes in the weight of individual living cancer cells taken from multiple myeloma (MM) patients can accurately predict whether their cancer will respond to different drug treatments. The microfluidic device, known as a suspended microchannel resonator (SMR), is capable of weighing cells 10 to 100 times more accurately than any other existing method, making it possible to measure changes in the growth, or mass accumulation rate (MAR), of single cells over periods of just 10 to 20 minutes.
Last year, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) team that developed the SMR instrument demonstrated in different cancer cell models that a decrease in cancer cell MAR following drug treatment indicates that cells are sensitive to the drug, whereas their MAR doesn’t change if the cells are resistant. Working with colleagues at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, the team has now used the technique to predict drug sensitivity in nine MM patients who were either sensitive or resistant to a range of therapies.“When the clinical biomarkers showed that the patients should be sensitive to a drug, we also saw sensitivity by our measurement,” comments co-researcher Mark Stevens, Ph.D., a research scientist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. “ …in cases where the patients were resistant, we saw that in the clinical biomarkers as well as our measurement.”
Reporting their studies in Nature Communications, the authors write, “…we demonstrate that our MAR assay, without the need for extended culture ex vivo, correctly defines the response of nine patients to standard-of-care drugs according to their clinical diagnoses.” The paper is entitled “Determining Therapeutic Susceptibility in Multiple Myeloma by Single-Cell Mass Accumulation.”
Multiple myeloma is an incurable bone marrow cancer characterized by high rates of drug resistance and relapse, despite the development of targeted drugs, antibodies, chemotherapeutics, and stem cell transplants. For many cancers, therapeutic decision-making is based largely on identifying genetic or epigenetic markers, but for MM, there is no way to predict, whether using genetic markers or other means, how a patient will respond to a particular drug.
A Cancer Cell’s Weight Predicts Its Therapeutic Opponent
