How contact lenses could be used to diagnose cancer

Researchers have developed a contact lens that can catch and identify exosomes, nanometer-sized vesicles prevalent in human fluids that have the potential to be diagnostic cancer biomarkers. In an initial validation experiment, the ACSM-CL was tested against exosomes secreted into supernatants from ten different tissue and cancer cell lines. In final experiments, exosomes in supernatants collected from three different cell lines with different surface marker expressions were tested against the ACSM-CL, along with different combinations of marker-specific detection antibodies. The resultant patterns of detection and non-detection of exosomes from the three different cell lines were as expected, thus validating the ACSM-CL's ability to accurately capture and detect exosomes with different surface markers.