New method kills cancer and harvests stem cells
Device filters blood for cancer cells to kill and stem cells to harvest -- a non-controversial way of obtaining stem cells that can be differentiated into other, useful cells
Friday, January 05, 2007

Associate Professor Michael King of the University of Rochester Biomedical Engineering Department has invented a device that filters the blood for cancer and stem cells. When he captures cancer cells, he kills them. When he captures stem cells, he harvests them for later use in tissue engineering, bone marrow transplants, and other applications that treat human disease and improve health.

With Nichola Charles, Jared Kanofsky, and Jane L. Liesveld of the University of Rochester, King wrote about his discoveries in a paper titled "Using Protein-Functionalized Microchannels for Stem Cell Separation."

King’s team includes scientists at StemCapture, Inc., a Rochester company that bought the University patent for King’s technique in November 2005 to build the cancer-killing and stem cell-harvesting devices. The technique can be used in vivo, meaning a device is inserted in the body, or in vitro, in which case the device resides outside of the body – either way, the device kills cancer cells and captures stem cells, which grow into blood cells, bone, cartilage, and fat. the rest