New Cell-Collection Device Aims to Catch Ovarian Cancer Earlier

Ovarian cancer’s high mortality rate often comes down to timing: caught early, five-year survival can top 90 percent, but by stage 3 or 4 it drops to less than half that. Much of the disease originates in the fallopian tubes, where precancerous lesions are often microscopic and difficult to sample, making early detection especially hard.

To address that gap, a team led by MIT professor Kripa Varanasi has built a handheld device that gently collects living cells from specific locations in tissue rather than destroying them in the process. “We wanted to collect living cells from specific regions of the fallopian tube while leaving the surrounding tissue intact,” says Varanasi, senior author of the study published in Device. “Once we have these living cells, there are many things we can do with them. We can use them for diagnostics, grow them into organoids, and build living models of disease. Ultimately, this could allow us to test how an individual patient’s cells respond to different treatments and help us develop more personalized medicines.”

Traditional pathology involves preserving removed fallopian tubes in chemical fixative and slicing them for examination under a microscope, killing the cells in the process. “It’s very time-consuming and destructive to the cells,” Varanasi says. “We wanted to bring new capabilities to pathology, so we can not only see what these cells look like, but also collect them alive and study how they behave.” The idea took shape after the team observed surgeries at Johns Hopkins: “We do a lot of work on fluid-surface interfaces in my lab, and we realized we could use a fluid instead of a scalpel or brush, because when you flow a fluid it applies shear stress at the interface,” Varanasi says.

The resulting 3D-printed microfluidic device forms a vacuum seal against tissue, then uses a second syringe to push fluid through a narrow channel, gently shearing cells free. “The vacuum creates a seal, so nothing leaks, and then we locally apply what is basically a microfluidic chip on the tissue that gently shears the cells off,” says co-author Bert Vandereydt. In testing on fresh human fallopian tube samples, cells collected this way stayed viable and grew into organoids more readily than cells gathered through conventional methods, and the approach can be tuned to work across different cancer types by adjusting the shear stress applied.

The team sees the technology eventually moving from excised tissue toward in-patient sampling and integration into routine pathology. “If this work can ultimately help women by enabling earlier detection of ovarian cancer, I would find that incredibly fulfilling,” Varanasi says.