Alessandra Luchini is an engineer at George Mason University, Washington DC. Enabled by a grant from the Italian health service, she travelled to the US to study the molecular signs that some cancers release into the bloodstream. She was recently named in Popular Science’s ‘Brilliant 10’ – an award for the achievements of scientists under 30.
Why did you choose this line of research?
We know that cancers have biomarkers that exist in the blood and body fluid in very low concentration, but they are volatile and degrade very quickly. So we were looking for something that current technology did not allow us to seek. We needed to figure out some kind of answer to that.Why did you alight on nanoparticles as a tool to solve this?
Nanoparticles have been used for the opposite function: drug delivery, where they are loaded with a drug and then inserted in the body of the patient to deliver the medicine directly to the target. So we used the same concept but engineered them for the opposite goal – to capture things that are present in the body fluids.