Scientists at the University of Colorado Boulder and Princeton University have employed a tool often used in geology to detect the atomic fingerprints of cancer, according to a new study.
The researchers discovered that cancer cells may be made from a different assortment of hydrogen atoms than healthy cells. These findings could give doctors new strategies for studying how cancer grows and spreads, and its atomic “fingerprint” could lead to new ways to detect cancer early on.
CU Boulder geochemist Ashley Maloney, who led the study, explained that hydrogen comes in two main “flavors,” or isotopes. Some hydrogen atoms, called deuterium, are a little heavier than the others, usually just known as hydrogen.
On Earth, hydrogen atoms outnumber deuterium atoms by a ratio of about 6,420 to one. The practice of examining this ratio in different fields has been around for decades, and has helped scientists examine things like the Earth’s climate history. The researchers aimed to put this tool to use in the medical field, to help detect cancer on the atomic level.
The researchers set up colonies of yeast, whose cells fuel their growth in a similar way to cancer cells when they ferment, in labs at Princeton and CU Boulder. Biologists at Princeton conducted a separate experiment with colonies of healthy and cancerous mouse liver cells. The researchers pulled the fatty acids from the cells and used a machine called a mass spectrometer to examine the ratio of hydrogen atoms to deuterium atoms inside.
The team found that fermenting yeast cells, the kind that resemble cancer, contained roughly 50% fewer deuterium atoms on average than the normal yeast cells. Cancerous cells exhibited a similar, but not quite as strong, shortage in deuterium and proved to be discernible from healthy cells on the atomic level.
The team isn’t sure how this signal might appear in the bodies of real cancer patients, if at all. But if this tool could help detect cancer in patients, the potential could be big, said Sebastian Kopf, a co-author of the study and an assistant professor in geological sciences at CU Boulder.
“Your chances of survival are so much higher if you catch cancer early on,” Kopf said in an interview with CU Boulder Today. “If this isotopic signal is strong enough that you could detect it through something like a blood test, that could give you an important hint that something is off.”
Read the full study here: pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2310771121
