One touch of this pen can detect cancer almost immediately.Well it’s a game changer because I was doing a case the other day with a surgeon and we had to wait an additional two hours because the current method takes that long.
Aydin Zahedivash is a medical student and co-creator of the Mass Effect Pen.He says the pen can deliver cancer results within 20 seconds and is much less invasive for the patient than the traditional method of confirming the disease that process usually will involve taking out some of the tissue which means cutting it from a patient.
Our technology can detect cancer inside of a tissue without cutting it or altering it.
A drop of water on the pen pulls molecules from the suspected cancerous tissue during surgery.This instrument called a mass spectrometer that analyzes the water to determine whether cancer is present.It adds precision to detecting cancer. In seconds surgeons will know what part of the tissue to exercise,how much to cut and what not to cut, so healthy tissue isn’t damaged.
We’ve done testing on human tissues that have been taken out of patients and those have shown 96% accuracy detecting cancer from not-detected cancer.Newly available technologies have allowed an interdisciplinary team to develop this pen in two and a half years.We’ve 3D-printed all the prototyping which allowed us to rapidly develop a design network.
So Zahedivash says within the year the Mass Spec Pen will be tested in surgery at the Dell Medical School at the University of Texas at Austin.There are also plans to test this technology at MD Anderson Cancer Center and Baylor College of Medicine in Houston Texas.
Elizabeth Lee, VOA News, Austin.