Researchers take cue from butterfly wings to design new cancer diagnosis technique

Researchers at the University of California San Diego (UC) are designing a new imaging technique for cancer diagnosis inspired by butterfly wings.

The ongoing research was announced in a press release on 21 February, which the researchers said is a quest to make cancer diagnosis faster, more accurate, and more accessible worldwide.

Using the science of butterfly beauty

The research ideas draw inspiration from the Morpho Butterfly, which is a colorful species with blue wings.

According to the scientists, the wings do not have such radiant beauty because of pigment but because they can manipulate light through the use of microscopic structures.

This same idea of microscopic structures are being harnessed to gain detailed insights into the fibrous makeup of cancer biopsy samples without the need for chemical staining or expensive imaging equipment.

This can easily help oncologists determine whether a patient’s cancer is in an early or advanced stage, which current clinical methods are not able to do easily. 

The idea came from Paula Kirya, a mechanical engineering graduate student at UC San Diego who previously studied the Morpho butterfly’s wings and their optical properties as an undergraduate student researcher at Pasadena City College.  

Kirya said:

“Essentially, we’re trying to expand on these procedures with a stain-free alternative that requires nothing more than a standard optical microscope and a piece of a Morpho wing. In many parts of the world, early cancer screening is a challenge because of resource limitations. If we can provide a simpler and more accessible tool, we can help more patients get diagnosed before their cancers reach aggressive stages.”

With this method, the resulting signals can then be translated into a measure of how dense and organized the collagen fibers are in the biopsy sample using a mathematical model they developed.

While the current study is focused on breast cancer, the researchers believe the technique could be applied to a wide range of fibrotic diseases.