IIT-M, Cancer Institute to develop device for early diagnosis of ovarian cancer

The prestigious Indian Institute of Technology-Madras (IIT-M) will collaborate with the Adyar Cancer Institute (WIA) to develop a point-of-care device for the early diagnosis of ovarian cancer.

IIT-M and WIA have entered into a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to develop a kit for the early diagnosis of ovarian cancer.

The technology developed from this collaboration with be transferred to a suitable industrial partner who will manufacture and market the testing kit to the general public, the IIT-M said.

Ovarian cancer is the seventh most common cancer and the eighth leading cause of cancer-associated death in women. As many as 3.14 lakh persons were diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2020 of which 44,000 are from India. And of those 2.7 lakh deaths in 2020 globally, 32,077 are from India.

Ovarian cancer is considered a silent killer since most patients do not have any symptoms in the early stage or have non-specific symptoms which are usually ignored, resulting in most patients presenting in advanced stages of the disease.

Under funding from the Department of Science and Technology, Govt. of India, the Department of Molecular Oncology at the Cancer Institute [WIA] had undertaken research to identify proteins that can be detected in the blood which can help in the diagnosis of epithelial ovarian cancers, which accounts for over 90% of the ovarian cancers.

“The study used high end proteomics Tandem Mass Tag (TMT) based quantitative analysis by high resolution mass spectrometry] for initial identification of proteins which were differentially expressed in epithelial ovarian cancers,” Dr T. Rajkumar, Professor and Head, Department of Molecular Oncology, Cancer Institute, said.

There were over 507 blood proteins that were expressed differently between healthy subjects and epithelial ovarian cancer patients. A two-stage validation was then undertaken. 21 of the 507 proteins in blood that were found to be expressed at different levels were taken up for validation using an advanced technique called Quantibody array, the institute said.

Dr V V Raghavendra Sai, Associate Professor (Biomedical Engineering), Department of Applied Mechanics, IIT-M said, the MoU gives the institute an excellent opportunity to work closely with the clinicians towards a deeper understanding of the bottlenecks on the clinical diagnosis and gain from the rich experience to develop robust systems.

“The clinicians also will have an avenue to see the potential of the latest technological developments and guide us to effectively tailor them to meet the needs. The state-of-the-art high throughput systems, available only in the centralised diagnostic laboratories for screening for disease markers, are limited by the infrastructure, cost, access and sometimes sensitivity,” he added.