Cancer cells softer than healthy cells: study

By Will Dunham

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Cancer cells, like ripe fruit, are much softer than healthy cells, scientists said on Sunday in a finding that could help doctors diagnose tumors and figure out which might be the deadliest.

The researchers used a nanotechnology device called an Atomic Force Microscope that allowed them to give a little poke to healthy cells and cancerous cells that had spread from the original site of tumors.

Cancer cells taken from people with pancreatic, breast and lung tumors were more than 70 percent softer than benign cells, the scientists wrote in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

"The bottom line is now we can feel the cancer cells with this technology, in addition to looking at them and analyzing them in a molecular way," Jianyu Rao of the Jonsson Cancer Center at the University of California at Los Angeles, one of the researchers, said in a telephone interview.

"We think it may be diagnostically helpful."

The different types of cancer cells examined in the study exhibited similar levels of softness, allowing the healthy and diseased ones to be clearly identified.

The technique may represent a new method for detecting cancer, particularly in cells from body cavity fluids for which diagnosis with current techniques can be difficult, the researchers said.

Conventional diagnostic methods miss about 30 percent of cases in which cancer cells are present in this fluid, the researchers said.