‘MasSpec Pen’ flags cancerous tissue during pancreatic surgery

A diagnostic tool called the MasSpec Pen accurately identifies tissues and surgical margins directly in pancreatic cancer patients and differentiates healthy and cancerous tissue from banked pancreas samples.

Researchers tested the tool for the first time in pancreatic cancer patients during surgery.

At about 15 seconds per analysis, the method is more than 100 times as fast as the current gold standard diagnostic, Frozen Section Analysis. The ability to accurately identify margins between healthy and cancerous tissue in pancreatic cancer surgeries can give patients the greatest chance of survival.

“These results show the technology works in the clinic for surgical guidance,” says Livia Schiavinato Eberlin, an assistant professor of chemistry at the University of Texas at Austin who leads the team that invented the pen, in collaboration with James Suliburk, head of endocrine surgery at Baylor University.

“Surgeons can easily integrate the MasSpec Pen into their workflow, and the initial data really supports the diagnostic accuracy we were expecting to achieve.”

The most common type of pancreatic cancer, pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma, spreads rapidly and is highly lethal, with a five-year survival rate of 9% for all stages. The most effective treatment option is surgical removal of the tumor.

Cancer surgeons face a dilemma: It’s often difficult to tell good tissue from bad. If any cancerous tissue is left behind, there’s a risk the tumor will regrow, potentially requiring the patient to undergo additional rounds of surgery, radiation, or chemotherapy, and decreasing the chances of survival.

On the other hand, removing too much healthy tissue, especially from vital organs, can also compromise a patient’s health. Determining the margin between healthy and cancerous tissue is critical to a successful surgery.

For this study, the investigators first used the MasSpec Pen to analyze 157 banked human pancreatic tissues to develop and evaluate the technology in the laboratory for pancreatic cancer. Then, the investigators moved the system to the operating room at Baylor St. Luke’s Medical Center in Houston, which is affiliated with Baylor College of Medicine, where the surgeons tested the technology in 18 pancreatic surgeries.

The pen has been tested in more than 150 human surgeries to date, including for breast and thyroid, and results of those additional tests will be submitted for publication soon.

Mary King, a graduate student and the study’s first author, and other members of the Eberlin research group operated the mass spectrometer during surgery. A typical surgery to remove a pancreatic tumor can take from 6 to 12 hours.

“Surgery of the pancreas is a very complex and detailed surgery that requires numerous intraoperative decisions over several hours that can have long-lasting effects on oncologic outcomes for patients with pancreas cancer,” says George Van Buren, associate professor of surgery at Baylor and one of the surgeons who performed operations during the experiment. “The MasSpec Pen technology opens the door for real-time, precision medicine to be performed in the operating room at a level that has never been seen before.”

These are the first published results of intraoperative use of the MasSpec Pen, in other words, on intact or just-removed tissue from patients during surgery. The researchers plan eventually to submit the design to the US Food and Drug Administration for approval as a medical device.

The results will appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The Cooperative Human Tissue Network and Baylor provided the banked tissue samples. The National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation supported the work. Eberlin receives support for research in her lab from the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas.

King, Suliburk, Eberlin, Jialing Zhang, and others are inventors in US Patent No. 10,643,832 and/or in other patent applications related to the MasSpec Pen technology licensed by the University of Texas to MS Pen Technologies Inc. and its subsidiary Genio Technologies. Zhang, Suliburk, and Eberlin are shareholders in MS Pen Technologies Inc.

Livia Schiavinato Eberlin, a co-founder with an equity stake in MSP Technologies, an inventor-led startup formed to commercialize the MasSpec Pen technology, owned by the university, has submitted required financial disclosure forms with the university. Eberlin is a co-founder with an equity stake in MSP Technologies, an inventor-led startup formed to commercialize the MasSpec Pen technology, owned by the university.

Source: University of Texas at Austin

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