ENGINEER SPOTLIGHT: John Viator - Biomedical Engineer
- Listening for Cancer's Early Warning
John Viator has an ear for skin cancer. Literally.
Viator, a biomedical engineering professor at the University
of Missouri, Columbia, fashioned the listening device
out of a laser, special microphones and a computer interface.
And while the setup doesn’t look much like an
ear—Viator calls it a photoacoustic detection
system—he thinks it can help doctors “listen
in” on deadly melanoma cells as they spread throughout
the bloodstream.
Although melanoma is the rarest type of skin cancer,
it is also the most deadly, accounting for nearly 74
percent of skin cancer-related deaths in the United
States last year, according to estimates from the American
Cancer Society. Melanoma’s lethality arises from
the fact that the cancer often goes undetected. It frequently
looks like an innocuous mole, and by the time a patient
realizes the discolored bump is something more serious,
its cancerous cells have often metastasized—broken
away from the original tumor and spread to other parts
of the body.
Viator hopes to catch these metastasized melanoma cells
early on, when chemotherapy has a better chance of killing
them, thereby giving patients a better chance of survival.
“Specifically, we’re looking at circulating
tumor cells in the bloodstream,” he explains.
Viator and his research team shoot a laser at a sample
of blood. The laser light heats up the melanin in any
melanoma cells that may be hanging around, forcing it
to expand. As the melanin quickly cools down, it makes
a unique cracking sound—inaudible to human ears—by
creating ultrasonic waves. Viator records these noises
with special microphones.
Since melanoma cells are the only cells in the bloodstream
that carry melanin, the technique is excellent at detecting
the disease specifically. Viator says the technique
is so sensitive that he can find melanoma with only
10 cancer cells present. Doctors could use the technique
to see if a patient’s melanoma has metastasized,
to judge how efficiently chemotherapy is working for
someone with melanoma and to look out for the disease
in people whose genes put them at a higher risk for
developing it.
The technique is cheaper and easier than what doctors
currently use to track melanoma, and it gives a quantitative
measure of how many melanoma cells have made it into
the bloodstream. “The most complicated part is
drawing blood. The whole procedure should take 20 minutes,”
Viator says. He’s already gotten a lot of interest
from patients and is setting up a pilot study.
Viator became interested in the problem almost two
years ago, when Paul Dale, the university’s chief
of surgical oncology, made a visit to the engineering
department. “He said there are lots of problems
in medicine that we really need engineers to tackle,”
Viator recalls.
It was a call that spoke to precisely what got Viator
interested in BME in the first place. “The appeal
of biomedical engineering was that it gave me the ability
to make people’s lives better,” he says.
“What could be better than being able to do what
you love—engineering, physics and math—and
be able to apply it to something that is as rewarding
as healing people?”
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