Differential scanning calorimetry of gliomas: a new tool in brain cancer diagnostics?

Background: Thermal stability signatures of complex molecular interactions in biological fluids can be measured using differential scanning calorimetry (DSC). Evaluating the thermal stability of plasma proteomes offers a method of producing a disease-specific "signature" (thermogram) in neoplastic and autoimmune diseases.

Objective: The authors describe the use of DSC with human brain tumor tissue to create unique thermograms for correlation with histological tumor classification.

Preliminary use of differential scanning calorimetry of cerebrospinal fluid for the diagnosis of glioblastoma multiforme.

Thermal stability signatures of complex molecule interaction in biological fluids can be measured using a new approach called differential scanning calorimetry (DSC). The thermal stability of plasma proteome has been described previously as a method of producing a disease-specific "signature," termed thermogram, in several neoplastic and autoimmune diseases. We describe the preliminary use of DSC performed on cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) as a diagnostic tool for the identification of patients with glioblastoma multiforme (GBM).

Competitive displacement: a sensitive and selective method for the detection of unlabeled molecules.

We propose a new method for molecular detection that retains the sensitivity of fluorescence, but without requiring fluorescence labeling of the sample. The method works by spiking the sample solution with one or more labeled molecular species of known concentration. With proper choice of these "competitor" species, their binding kinetics can be used to quantitatively determine the concentration of unlabeled target species.