Here comes a smartphone laboratory that can detect cancer

Washington State University researchers have developed a low-cost, portable laboratory on a smartphone that can analyse several samples at once to catch a cancer biomarker, producing lab quality results. The research team created an eight channel smartphone spectrometer that can detect human interleukin-6 (IL-6), a known biomarker for lung, prostate, liver, breast and epithelial cancers.

A spectrometer analyses the amount and type of chemicals in a sample by measuring the light spectrum. “The spectrometer would be especially useful in clinics and hospitals that have a large number of samples without on-site labs, or for doctors who practice abroad or in remote areas,” said lead researcher Lei Li, Assistant Professor in the School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering. It is impossible to carry a whole lab in remote areas, Li added. And hence need for a portable and efficient device became important.

The existing smartphone spectrometers can only monitor or measure a single sample at a time, making them inefficient for real world applications. The multichannel spectrometer can measure up to eight different samples at once using a common test called ELISA that identifies antibodies and colour change as disease markers, according to a study published in the journal Biosensors and Bioelectronics.

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