By Diagnostics World Staff
June 20, 2025 | Researchers at King's College London have developed a diagnostic tool that could enable doctors to sample tissue during critical medical procedures. The nanoneedle patch technology, published this week in Nature Nanotechnology, enables physicians to extract molecular information from living tissue without causing damage or killing cells—a capability that could prove especially valuable in delicate surgical situations.
Transforming Surgical Decision-Making
The technology's most immediate clinical impact may be in brain surgery, said Ciro Chiappini, senior author on the paper and Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Craniofacial and Regenerative Biology at King’s College. When deciding whether to remove suspicious tissue, surgeons must extract samples and wait up to an hour for frozen section analysis—all while the patient remains under anesthesia. The limited information from these traditional biopsies forces surgeons to make high-stakes decisions about removing tissue that could be healthy brain matter.
The nanoneedle patches could gather comprehensive molecular samples in just ten seconds without removing any tissue, potentially providing surgeons with the robust information they need to make confident decisions during operations.
The diagnostic applications extend far beyond neurosurgery. The technology could enable safer monitoring of atherosclerotic plaques during routine stent procedures, where traditional sampling would cause dangerous ruptures. For head and neck cancers, it could allow regular monitoring without the need for repeated invasive biopsies.
The nanoneedle arrays work by creating an imprint or replica that captures proteins, lipids, and mRNA from cells while preserving both molecular content and spatial relationships between different tissue regions. This "spatiotemporal" capability allows researchers to study how diseases develop and progress over time—something impossible with traditional sampling methods that destroy tissue.
Manufacturing and Implementation
The patches are manufactured using standard semiconductor processes and can be produced on large wafers, though medical applications would use much smaller patches. The collected samples can be analyzed using various techniques, including mass spectrometry imaging for lipids and specialized platforms for proteins and RNA analysis.
While clinical trials will be required before direct patient use, Chiappini describes the work as a "fundamental scientific breakthrough" that lays the groundwork for understanding longitudinal disease development at the molecular level.