Sharing the details of this technology in the “Studio VOA” publication, Durmuş said, “Our studies on cancer research are about extracting the cells from the blood, which are rarely seen, that circulate in the blood of patients and cause the cancer to spread and be carried from one point to another. The existence of these cells has actually been known since the early 1900s, in the medical world. But there were some technological problems,” he said.
Emphasizing that there are billions of cells in human blood, but that there are only one or a thousand of these cells in the blood of a cancer patient, Gözde Durmuş said that it is technologically very difficult to select these cells from the blood, but this can be done quickly and quickly with the technological innovation they have developed.
Associate Professor Gözde Durmuş said, “We can visualize the blood by flying these cells between two magnets, between magnets called sandwiches, and if we were to ask what this little instrument will do and what it is measuring, he showed us that we can measure both the magnetic properties and the density of the cells very precisely, in 2014. As we all know, the density of cells or a substance is the most basic feature, and when we look at blood cells, cancer cells are much lighter than healthy white blood and red blood cells. Thus, they can fly to a much higher position in the zero-gravity environment we have created between these two magnets. Thanks to the mirrors we use here, we can easily view these cells in the blood. In this way, we can easily understand whether there are unhealthy cancer cells that should not be in the blood of patients or not.
The device, which has been tested in the world’s leading cancer research centers since 2010, was made ready to be put on the market with an initiative established in 2017.
Durmuş said, “The results obtained both in my own laboratory and in these cancer centers are exciting. Especially researchers or research centers can use it now, they can access it, but of course we do not recommend that patients use it at home. Because in order to make a diagnosis, it must first be used in a hospital setting. But the work I want to do in the future focuses on making these technologies usable at home.”
Emphasizing the importance of early diagnosis, Associate Professor Gözde Durmuş said, “As you know, cancer is a disease that affects many families. It is a disease that I and my family have unfortunately experienced, but cancer is a treatable disease when caught early, diagnosed early, and therefore early diagnosis is important. Especially if there is a history of such a disease in your family or if there is a genetic disorder diagnosed, such individuals need to control themselves more, but cancer or other diseases that can be caught early will enter a path that can be treated very easily with current medical innovations. That’s why I strongly believe in the importance of early diagnosis.”
Today, when cancer diagnosis and treatment is expensive, Durmuş stated that the cost of the chip in question is quite low. Associate Professor Durmuş said, “We can even build this device as a lego in the laboratory. We have two magnets. These are as weak as the magnets we use on the refrigerator. But we can make such a weak magnetic field much stronger with a different physical configuration. We combine these two magnets with plastic parts. In fact, the cost to us in our lab is $5 to make one chip. That’s why I believe that it can be used even in the home environment in the future, since we can actually produce it very cheaply.