Antoine Riaud might need to take his wife on a second honeymoon. You’re supposed to spend that first romantic getaway obsessing over your new spouse, not how cells behave in an acoustics experiment. But when inspiration calls…well, it can be hard to ignore.
For some time Riaud had been working on an idea for a new medical device, inspired by evidence that cancerous cells exhibit different physical properties than healthy cells. In particular, cancerous cells are softer—easier to deform—than their healthy counterparts. This suggests that measuring cell softness could be a way to diagnose cancer and monitor its progression, and maybe other diseases as well.
Riaud was a post-doc in Valerie Taly’s research group at Paris Descartes University (Paris V) when he started thinking about this possibility. After reading up on the subject, he realized that none of the existing techniques for measuring cell softness could work in a clinical setting. They either required elaborate setups with high-…
For some time Riaud had been working on an idea for a new medical device, inspired by evidence that cancerous cells exhibit different physical properties than healthy cells. In particular, cancerous cells are softer—easier to deform—than their healthy counterparts. This suggests that measuring cell softness could be a way to diagnose cancer and monitor its progression, and maybe other diseases as well.
Riaud was a post-doc in Valerie Taly’s research group at Paris Descartes University (Paris V) when he started thinking about this possibility. After reading up on the subject, he realized that none of the existing techniques for measuring cell softness could work in a clinical setting. They either required elaborate setups with high-…