![]() Within the alginate matrix, the team was able to incorporate molecular strands that attract the miRNAs Elias hoped to sample. Their tiny prongs are coated with hydrogels, a network of polymers that can absorb water or biological fluids without losing their structure.Īnasuya Mandal SM ’14, PhD ’17, who completed her PhD under Irvine and Hammond, started making hydrogels out of alginate, a benign seaweed extract. The patches are made of a biodegradable, FDA-approved polymer similar to the material used in resorbable sutures. Sasan Jalili, a postdoctoral research associate the Koch Institute, helped design the microneedle patches to project only several hundred microns into the skin, where there are few capillaries and pain receptors. When Elias asked, “If I can identify a ‘fingerprint’ of microRNAs associated with ovarian cancer, can we use your tool set to detect it,” Irvine says they started thinking about microneedles as a way to sample material out of-rather than delivering things into-the skin. We need multiple means of addressing this disease. Ovarian cancer over the past 30 years has seen very little improvement in survivability. ![]() Made up of nucleic acids that synthesize proteins in all living cells, miRNAs can be found in blood, urine, saliva, and the interstitial fluid between blood vessels and cells.Įlias knew Irvine, whose background is in immunology, and Hammond had been developing microneedle patches as an alternative to traditional vaccine delivery and as a tool for gauging immune responses and pinpointing infections. MiRNAs are small, noncoding strands of RNA that regulate gene expression. When he later started his own lab at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and began evaluating microRNAs’ (miRNAs) potential as a biomarker, he immediately thought that Hammond and Irvine’s microneedle technology could prove useful. Elias, intrigued by nanomedicine’s potential for cancer treatment, became a postdoctoral associate in Hammond’s lab at MIT. Kevin Elias at the Dana- Farber Cancer Institute. She learned some daunting truths about ovarian cancer in 2013, when she met oncologist Dr. “We’ve needed to be much sneakier about how we approach ovarian cancer,” Hammond says. Further, unlike cancers with known genetic origins, ovarian cancer has more opaque causes. Yet ovarian cancer strikes her as particularly insidious: it’s hard to detect and often diagnosed too late to save the patient. Hammond has a wealth of experience developing biomaterials to enable targeted drug and gene delivery for a variety of challenging disorders. The work is supported by the Bridge Project, a collaboration drawing on expertise from the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT and the Dana-Farber/ Harvard Cancer Center that brings bioengineering, advanced cancer science, and clinical oncology together to solve today’s most challenging problems in cancer research and care. The microneedle patch Hammond is developing with Irvine, the Underwood-Prescott Professor in the departments of biological engineering and materials science and engineering, could become a lifesaving tool for the early detection of ovarian cancer. We need multiple means of addressing this disease there’s not going to be a single bullet,” says Hammond, Institute Professor and head of the Department of Chemical Engineering. “Ovarian cancer over the past 30 years has seen very little improvement in survivability. MIT researchers Darrell Irvine PhD ’00 and Paula Hammond ’84, PhD ’93 are melding their expertise in engineering, immunology, and polymer chemistry to change that. Short of a biopsy, there’s currently no screening method or diagnostic test for ovarian cancer, the fifth-leading cause of cancer deaths among women. ![]() In 2019, 20 women diagnosed with ovarian tumors agreed to try out a new MIT-designed skin patch-a small, clear, flexible disc that may one day become the first noninvasive screening tool for ovarian cancer.
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