Taming tumours

For over a decade now, S. Mahalingam's lab at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras has been trying to understand the biology of pancreatic cancer in Indian patients. He and his colleagues use a variety of tools to probe DNA and RNA in tumour samples from patients to develop a greater understanding of the cancer. Earlier this year, Mahalingam's lab acquired a tool from the U.S.-based company NanoString, which let them analyse cellular activity at any specific time on pancreatic tumour samples. It was a milestone in their research.

This tool could measure gene activity in a cell while retaining information about the location of the cell. This information about the location of a cell is critical to developing a holistic understanding of tumour biology. To conduct these experiments, the researchers begin with a really thin section of the tumour and measure the gene activity in that section using fluorescent probes for genes. The presence or absence of a gene is then assessed using an optical scanning device. For every gene that is found to be active in a specific tumour, this technique also provided information about the "type of cell that it is active in, the precise location within the tumour, and whether it is active in the neighbouring cells", Mahalingam says.