Image by Difu Wu
Researchers have used a tiny force probe to compare how healthy hematopoietic cells and cancerous ones respond to stress.
They found that cells harvested from the bone marrow of 5 patients with chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) appeared much stiffer than comparable samples taken from 5 healthy volunteers.
In addition, the researchers were able to identify areas of localized brittle failure events in the CML cells.
“What makes this work so exciting to us is not simply seeing a difference between the stiffness of healthy and cancerous cells but observing that the cancerous cells also lost their dynamic ductility and behaved as more breakable objects,” said study author Françoise Argoul, PhD, of the French National Centre for Research (CNRS) in Lyon, France.
Dr Argoul and her colleagues described this work in Physical Biology.
The researchers believe the mechanical signatures obtained by squeezing or deforming cells could potentially assist physicians in determining the presence of CML and other hematologic malignancies.
The mechanical data might also provide clues as to how long the cells have been affected by the cancer.
“We would like to construct a hematopoietic cancer cell chart where the loss of cell mechanical functions could be graded, depending on the leukemia and its stage of evolution,” Dr Argoul said.
Thinking about how the technique might be applied in a hospital setting, she added that biopsy needles could, in principle, be adapted to allow local sensing of internal soft tissue structures.
However, before the researchers can even progress to testing cells inside the body and preparing for clinical trials, they must first build up sufficient information from their measurements on isolated cells under a range of conditions in the lab.
