The cancer-detecting pen, which became popular after its appearance in Grey’s Anatomy, was actually created by Brazilian scientist Livia Chiavinato Eberlein, who graduated from the State University of Campinas (Unicamp), in the city of São Paulo. The tool is called the MacSpec Pen System, and is being tested for the first time in Brazil.
The tests are being conducted by researchers at the Albert Einstein Hospital, in the capital, São Paulo, in partnership with MS Pen Technologies, a startup affiliated with Lívia, and Thermo Fisher Scientific, which owns the high-resolution mass spectrometer to which the pen is attached.
In the North American series, the pen appears as an idea from Richard Webber, Surgeon General, in the fourteenth season. He developed the Gray Sloan Surgical Innovation Competition tool.
A pen that detects cancer in real time is being tested in Brazil
The clinical study will last 24 months and will include 60 cancer patients, 30 lung cancer patients, and 30 thyroid cancer patients. These tumors were selected based on surgical accessibility, complexity of intraoperative diagnosis, and maturity of the algorithm for identifying these tumors.
The pen that detects cancer
The portable pen-shaped device “reads” the molecular signature of tissue and indicates whether it is cancerous or healthy. Its main goal is to ensure that during cancer surgery all tumor tissue is removed from the patient’s body, as it is not always possible to see the boundary between the cancerous lesion and healthy tissue with the naked eye.
During the procedure, the surgeon touches the tissue to be analyzed with the tip of the pen. The device releases a drop of sterile water to collect particles from the surface and then withdraws them for immediate analysis in a Thermo Fisher mass spectrometer. Using artificial intelligence, the system compares the molecular profile to a database and provides a diagnosis in up to 90 seconds.
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This technology has already been applied in procedures involving breast, brain, ovarian and prostate tumors, and this approach has shown consistent results. In Brazil, the goal is to adapt the use to the local reality, and to evaluate the effectiveness of the diagnosis in lung and thyroid cancer, according to the hospital.
Who is the world?
Livia Eberlein holds a degree in Chemistry from UniCamp and is head of a research laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin in the United States. She completed her studies in Brazil in 2007 and moved abroad in 2008.
In Texas, a study began on a pen capable of extracting molecules from human tissue and determining the presence of cancer cells in the analyzed material.
The pen that detects cancer was invented by Brazilian scientist Livia Schiavinato Eberlein, a graduate of Unicamp University.
The researcher moved to the United States of America to pursue her doctorate, and there she gained fame in the scientific community by being one of the figures chosen in 2018 to receive the famous grant from the MacArthur Foundation, known as the “Genius Grant,” which is directed to professionals with outstanding and creative work in their field.
An invitation to appear on Grey’s Anatomy
Livia posted a video on her Instagram account telling how she received the invitation to star in the series. According to her, “It was something completely unexpected.”
The researcher was on maternity leave when she received an email—from someone she didn’t know—saying that the show’s producers were interested in featuring the instrument on the show and asking if she’d be interested in speaking to them.
“I decided to accept and thought: OK, I’ll talk to this person (who sent the email).”
After the meeting, no one heard from her for six months. Until she suddenly gets another email from the person who contacted her in the first place, warning her that the pen will appear in the next day’s episode.
“I got my research group together at my house, bought food and threw a little party for us to watch the pen in the episode,” he joked. “It was very funny because, in that first moment, they showed the pen for 3 seconds.” Gadget is mentioned several times throughout the season.
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