Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed a test capable of detecting ovarian tumors in their earliest stages, which could potentially improve patient five-year survival rates by 90 percent.

The findings, published in Nature Biomedical Engineering, resulted from tests in mice that were able to detect tumors with nodules smaller than two millimeters in diameter. The MIT researchers and engineers have developed the sensitive test to detect tumors as early as five months earlier than current tests. The team used synthetic biomarkers—nanoparticles that interact with tumor proteins to release fragments that can be detected in a urine sample.

"What we did in this paper is engineer our sensor to be about 15 times better than a previous version. [We] then compared it against a blood biomarker in a mouse model of ovarian cancer to show that we could beat it," said Sangeeta Bhatia, a member of MIT's Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and Institute for Medical Engineering and Science and senior author of the study.

By optimizing the length of the polymer that tethers peptides to the nanoparticle and adding a targeting molecule, which boosts the number of peptides detected in urine, the test significantly increased in sensitivity. This test has also been tested on its detection of colon tumors and is currently being adapted to detect other cancers.