Telegraph: Mikes Pick Up Sounds of Cancer- New Hope For Diagnosis?

[Guest guest]

Mikes pick up the sounds of cancer

Last Updated: 2:36am GMT 03/02/2008

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Cancer patients could have their disease diagnosed with microphones

after scientists discovered that cells " scream " when exposed to

infrared light.

 

Researchers at Manchester University have found that human cell

samples produce a distinctive noise when heated with an infrared

lamp.

 

Doctors hope to use the noise produced by cancer cells to develop

accurate diagnostic techniques without the need for painful surgery

to obtain tissue samples.

 

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Prostate cancer, for example, can be notoriously difficult to

detect, even with surgical biopsies, while blood tests can give

ambiguous results.

 

Dr Peter Gardner, the analytical chemist who led the research, said

that with a technique called photoacoustics, cells could be taken

from urine samples instead and tested using a microphone.

 

But he warned that it could be up to 10 years before such a test

becomes readily available.

 

He said the sound made by cancer cells was subtly different from

that made by healthy cells, " like a tuba in an orchestra being

horribly out of tune " .

 

More than 35,000 cases of prostate cancer are diagnosed in Britain

every year. It causes 10,000 deaths annually, making it the second

most common cause of cancer death after lung cancer.

 

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