Brazilian Develops Pen That Detects Cancer During Surgery

By Richard Mann, Contributing Reporter

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – A 33-year-old Brazilian scientist has developed a type of pen capable of detecting tumor cells in a matter of seconds. Livia Schiavinato Eberlin holds a degree in Chemistry from the State University of Campinas (Unicamp) and, despite her youth, is already head of a research laboratory at the University of Texas in Austin, United States.

Four years ago, she began investigating a device capable of extracting molecules from human tissue and identifying the presence of cancerous cells in tissue material analyzed.

The technology is under study but has already yielded promising results when used in the examination of 800 samples of human tissue.

The researcher, who has been living for ten years in the USA, where she earned her doctorate, is in Brazil this week to present the findings of her research at the Next Frontiers to Cure Cancer Congress, promoted annually by A.C. Camargo Cancer Center in the city of São Paulo.

In the United States, Livia Schiavinato Eberlin earned prominence in the scientific community by being among the leading scientists selected in 2018 to receive the renowned scholarship from the MacArthur Foundation, known as the “genius scholarship” for professionals with outstanding and creative performance in their area.

The US$625,000 award is for free use by scholars.

In an exclusive interview to a Brazilian news outlet, the researcher explained that the pen, named MacSpec Pen, aims to ensure, during an oncological surgery, that all of the tumor tissue has been removed from the patient’s body.

This is due to the fact that it is not always possible to visualize the boundary between the cancerous damage and the healthy tissue, to the naked eye.

“Often the tissue is removed and examined by a pathologist during surgery to confirm that the entire tumor was removed, but this process takes 30 to 40 minutes during which the patient remains exposed to anesthesia and other surgical risks,” explains Livia Schiavinato Eberlin.

The pen she and her team of researchers developed uses a chemical examination technique to provide the same response that a pathologist would do.

“The pen has a water-filled reservoir. When its tip touches the tissue, it captures molecules that dissolve in water and are transported to a mass spectrometer, a piece of equipment that distinguishes the sample as cancerous or not,” explains the scientist.

This classification of the sample as malignant or non-malignant can be done because the technology uses artificial intelligence techniques, apart from the chemical examination equipment, for the machine to “respond” when the cells are malignant.

To this end, hundreds of cancerous tissue samples were used in the development of the model, which, through their characteristics, “teach” the machine to identify tumor tissue.

“In the first phase of the research we analyzed over 200 human tissue samples and verified a 97 percent cancer identification accuracy,” says Livia.