Diamond treatment of cancer will no longer be distant from the laboratory to the clinic

       People don't expect diamonds to have anything to do with cancer treatment, but diamonds can actually improve the survival of cancer patients.
"The use of traditional technology, almost impossible to determine whether cancer treatments reached one hundred percent or Baijiushijiu% effective. This difference may have significant consequences, because even if there are only a few surviving cancer cells in the body, the cancer cells can still spread in the body. "Quantum mechanical diamond sensors will be very sensitive and can detect a small number of cancer cells in a large number of healthy cells," says Alexander hack, associate professor of physics at Technical University of Denmark.
Diamonds are not purchased from jewelers. They are synthetic diamonds, with micron layers on the surface, and have special properties for measuring.
The method is based on magnetic biomarkers, which can bind to cancer cells, but cannot bind to healthy cells, which is known as the principle of the method. But the hard part is: Although you've created a magnetic difference between the two cells, it needs a very sensitive sensor to detect the magnetic field around each marker.
The most famous example of magnetic sensors is the compass. The compass is sensitive to the earth's magnetic field, and it can sense the magnetic field between 30-40 tesla. Cancer diagnosis needs to be able to sense the magnetic field strength of tens of tesla.
The resolution of diamond sensor is about 1 microns. Alexander Huck said, "that's enough for us to distinguish biological cells. We want to detect and separate cancer cells in one million healthy cells."
Why use diamond to detect magnetic field?
Diamond consists of carbon atoms which are kept in a fixed three-dimensional grid. It does not interact with the magnetic field, so it is not suitable as a sensor. However, Alexander hack and researchers from Ulm and the University of Leipzig changed the structure and got a defect structure. Defects in the structure of each carbon atom, a nitrogen atom is replaced, this change will produce many holes in the lattice of carbon atoms, so that each atom disappear, then the diamond is heated to about 800 DEG C, which resulted in the structure until the hole moving them with the neighboring nitrogen atom. Then nitrogen atoms and holes combine to form a single structure -- a NV (nitrogen vacancy) center. The central role is to absorb the light from the green part of the spectrum, and the center emits red light.