A soft magnetoelastic microneedle patch for rapid skin cancer screening

PROJECT SUMMARY Over 2.5 million skin cancers are diagnosed annually in the United States, more than all other forms of cancers combined. Early diagnosis is critical; thus, we propose to develop a soft and wearable magnetoelastic microneedle patch (MMP) for non-invasive and rapid skin cancer screening. It could perform fast scanning of the spatial stiffness of skin lesions with depths of up to 5 mm. This concept is established on the basis of the PI’s prior success in discovering the giant magnetoelastic effect in soft matter (Nat. Mater. 2021, 20, 1670). With a fundamentally new working mechanism, the proposed soft MMP can cover a large detection area (7.7 cm2) and have a high spatial resolution (1 mm, trained with super-resolution algorithm), high framerate (2000 Hz), and ultrahigh sensitivity (<2 kPa). We hypothesize that the proposed soft MMP enables fast, non-invasive scanning of skin stiffness of both lesions and borders spatially, which can be used experimentally and/or in clinics for skin cancer early diagnosis and screening, longitudinal monitoring, and/or guiding cancer excisions. To test our hypothesis, we propose three aims. Aim 1: Scalable design and optimization of a soft MMP for fast spatial stiffness mapping. Aim 2: Validate the soft MMP via stiffness mapping in mice models with skin cancer. Aim 3: Validate the soft MMP via stiffness mapping in excised human skin cancer.