Khaberni - Researchers use robots to help detect cancer cells that remain dormant after treatment and to eliminate them, potentially accelerating the identification of more effective treatment avenues that could delay the disease or prevent its recurrence.
These "resilient" cells are rare, as they do not exceed one cell among every thousand cancer cells and are difficult to identify, yet they may lead to cancer recurrence.
Working with samples of lung cancer, researchers have identified nearly 10,000 cellular variations that might help the cancer cell "escape" from treatment effects.
They wanted to test varying doses of drugs already identified as potential treatments for "resilient" lung cancer cells, but these tests would require conducting 10,000 experiments, each taking a week.
Instead, they designed a robotic platform that contains thousands of miniaturized tumors placed in lab dishes inside controlled incubators. The robot arm moved the dishes between experiment stations.
Researchers said in a report published in Science Advances that nine out of 94 drugs tested showed consistent effectiveness, suggesting that "resilient" cells may share common vulnerabilities even if they appear in patients receiving different medications.
Steve Altschuler, the lead author of the study from the University of California, San Francisco, stated in an announcement "we expected each tumor to behave as its own case."
He added "instead, we found consistent patterns across many different samples, suggesting the possibility of underlying principles that could help predict which treatments are likely to be effective against the disease."
