A UCLA cancer study reported in this month’s Nature Nanotechnology validates earlier work by MIT engineers, and is emblematic of an explosion in research at the intersections of engineering, the life sciences and medicine, according to MIT Dean of Engineering Subra Suresh.Since about 2002, Suresh and colleagues have applied state-of-the-art techniques for the study of nanoscale mechanical properties of materials to the study of the physical characteristics of living cells, with a particular emphasis on infectious diseases and cancer. In several papers over the past three years, they have shown that metastatic, or spreading, pancreatic cancer cells are significantly softer (less stiff) than their benign and nonmetastatic counterparts. The results paved the way for a potential new diagnostic test for the disease.
