The road map towards providing a robust Raman spectroscopy-based cancer diagnostic platform and integration into clinic

Riccardo TAGLIAPIETRA, Renishaw

Over the last 15 years, Raman spectroscopy has been demonstrated to be able to distinguish healthy from cancerous tissues, and identify cancer stages and disease subtypes with high accuracy. These studies have been performed on a number of organs, such as the gastrointestinal (GI) tract, breast, brain, lymph nodes… The diagnostic accuracy surpasses our current gold standard. There is no doubt Raman spectroscopy can be a powerful cancer diagnostic tool. So the question we ask is: why isn’t Raman spectroscopy adopted for routine cancer diagnostics yet? 

The current gold standard of cancer tissue diagnostics remains to be haematoxylin and eosin (H&E) staining of suspect lesions . Since its introduction in 1837 by Wissowzky it remains to be the primary staining technique used today, despite being affected by subjectivity.

We propose for Raman imaging to be used as a cancer diagnostics tool, to identify cancer stages/subtypes through their spectral fingerprints, to extract chemical information and possibly lead to novel marker discovery. Imaging also provides spatial information, such as tumour margin analysis. Raman offers a means of removing the subjectivity of current diagnostics by providing an invariant and reproducible platform.

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