Painless real-time proteomics may one day speed up cancer surgery
Fournier, a professor at the University of Lille and co-director of a proteomics center of INSERM, the French national institute of health. In Her laboratory, she has worked for several years on a device. It was called “Spider Mass” that will enable the surgeons to identify markers of cancer in a living patient's tissue, during an operation. Surgery to remove a primary tumor and after some healthy surrounding tissue are removed, Although this process will help for preventing recurrence of the cancer, it can add up to 45 risky minutes under anesthesia. Fournier's device uses mass spectrometry method, which measures the mass of molecules from complex mixtures. But turning an in vivo tissue sample into gas phase ions for measurements can be a challenge. Until now, no one knew how to extract ions from living tissues without doing harm. Riffing on MALDI, it is an ionization strategy that uses a carrier molecule mixed with the analyte of interest; then they decided to ...