South Australian company Ferronova has developed the nanoparticles that are designed to identify early stage tumour and related cancer cells. Ferronova Chief Executive Stewart Bartlett said the tiny cancer tracers were expected to be trialled on oral cancer patients at the Royal Adelaide Hospital in April 2020, pending key approvals. Bartlett said once Ferronova’s polymer-coated iron oxide nanoparticles were injected into patients they would show up on an MRI within about 15 minutes. “The way they work in cancer is they’re designed to be detected around a solid tumour,” he said. “They’ll actually be picked up by your lymphatic system as a foreign body and follow the same pathway as any cancer spread from a primary tumour would follow. “If you can actually know where those particles are going you can also determine where the cancer would have gone.” Ferronova was spun out of a nanoparticles research collaboration between […]