Nanotechnologist Shan Wang, an associate professor of materials science and engineering and of electrical engineering at Stanford works with tiny magnets just a billionth of a meter long.
Apart from devising ways to make computing more efficient, his research group is also developing a magnetism-based ultrasensitive detector of DNA and proteins, including proteins associated with cancer.
Wang's specialty in magnetism is particularly important in medical applications because a magnetic field stands out like a flare in the night sky in magnetically neutral biological settings. Magnetism is more prominent than fluorescence, the current standard for signaling the detection of a cancer-related protein.
If a cancer marker could be made to trigger a magnetic change, the result could be production of a more sensitive cancer detector. With better detectors, doctors could diagnose emerging cancers earlier and know sooner whether a particular treatment is working.
Wang and his team plan to test for proteins associated with breast and prostate cancers. The researchers aim to produce a handheld device that could rapidly test for a number of diseases.
"Our ultimate goal is that if you are sitting in a doctor's office or an emergency room, we'll be providing the doctor with firsthand diagnostics in a time well below one hour," Wang says. "That would be the holy grail."
Oh, the image above is kind of irrelevant but cool anyway. It depicts a T-cell (colored orange) wasting a cancer cell.
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