Jeol USA has revealed that its Accutof-Dart mass spectrometer has been used in Georgia Institute of Technology's newly developed test for ovarian cancer.
Researchers at the institute said that the new test was demonstrated to be 99-100 per cent accurate over 100 patient samples examined in initial trials.
The test utilises a new diagnostic technique involving mass spectrometry of a single drop of blood serum.
The mass spectrometer used for the test is the Accutof-Dart from Jeol USA, which has the ability to instantly analyse virtually anything for its chemical composition with little or no sample preparation in most cases.
For the ovarian cancer test in development, Dr Facundo Fernandez, associate professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, and co-workers at Georgia Institute of Technology, analysed a sample from a single drop of blood serum from each test subject by using the hot helium plasma created by the Dart ion source.
The mass spectrometer then instantly analysed the relative abundance of metabolites, or small molecules in the serum.
Specially developed techniques were used to sort sets of metabolites found in cancerous plasma from those found in healthy samples.
The metabolic changes were mapped and proved to be 99-100 per cent accurate in distinguishing sera from women with ovarian cancer from normal controls without registering a single false positive or false negative.
The group is currently conducting the next set of assays, this time with 500 patients.
The results can be found online in the journal 'Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers, and Prevention Research' in the paper entitled 'Rapid Mass Spectrometric Metabolic Profiling of Blood Sera Detects Ovarian Cancer with High Accuracy'.
