Brilliant 10: The Chemical Catcher
Trapping and preserving biomarkers will help doctors detect cancer sooner When Alessandra Luchini was a girl growing up in Italy, she visited the Museo Galileo in Florence, where she saw the telescope that Galileo Galilei had invented four centuries before, in 1610. She was struck by its simplicity. with a just a couple of pieces of curved glass, anyone could see whole new worlds. In 2005, Luchini, now an engineer at George Mason University, came to the U.S. on a grant from the Italian National Health Service to study ways to detect molecular signs of cancer. Some diseases, early on, release faint hints of their presence into our bodily fluids. These "biomarkers" are ephemeral-our enzymes chew them up within minutes, so they're undetectable in most lab tests. If doctors had a way to catch and stabilize those biomarkers, they could detect diseases more quickly and begin treatment at a stage when...