Russian scientists have created magnetic microparticles coated with tannic acid. They capture exosomes — vesicles with biomarkers of cancerous tumors in the early stages. This was reported by the press service of the Russian Science Foundation (RSF).
Cancerous tumors release isolated microscopic vesicles, exosomes, into the environment, which transport tumor biomarkers into cells. The contents of these vesicles are used to diagnose the disease.
The widespread use of exosome chemical composition analysis will, in the future, simplify the diagnosis of various types of cancer at early stages. In the future, we plan to improve the surface structure of the obtained magnetic microparticles to further increase their effectiveness.
Exosomes are difficult to isolate from a patient's biomaterial, but the new method simplifies this task. Tannic acid, in addition to proteins and polymers, allows microparticles to bind to exosomes.
The study showed that microparticles with tannic acid on the surface extracted about 50-60% of the vesicles from the solution. Analogs without tannic acid detected only 34% of exosomes.
The new approach can be compared to the method of size exclusion chromatography (vesicles are passed through a gel layer to separate them from other components of the liquid). However, the new approach takes 2.5 hours compared to 4. This will speed up the diagnostic procedure for diseases.
Earlier, www1.ru reported that Russian scientists learned to remove tumors using electromagnetic radiation.
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