SAN DIEGO — A team of researchers at the University of California San Diego have discovered how butterfly wings could help advance cancer research.
Looking at the big potential inside tiny butterfly wings never gets old for Paula Kirya. She is a mechanical engineering grad student at UC San Diego and is trying to use the brilliant color in the Morpho butterfly as a new imaging technique to diagnose cancer.
“I’ve been working on this since I began my undergrad here, maybe 2021, and this hasn’t gotten boring,” Kirya said. “You see butterflies, insects all around, and the colors you typically see aren’t something like this — this brilliant blue.”
Kirya explained how the vibrant color is produced by tiny nanostructures that are great at manipulating light. She says their team discovered that by placing a breast cancer tissue sample on top of a Morpho butterfly wing and viewing it under a standard microscope, they can assess whether a tumor’s structure indicates early- or late-stage cancer.
“The more fibers there is the more we have that boost in contrast,” Kirya said. “And the bigger that change is, the more aware we are of the presence of these fibers and their density and how well organized they may be.”
Lisa Poulikakos, PhD, is a professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. She noted explained that one of their goals is to help clinics in under-resourced areas around the world that might not have access to traditional chemical staining or expensive imaging equipment.
“All that you need is a simple optical microscope that people can access worldwide in under resourced settings anywhere,” Poulikakos said. “You place basically unstained tissue on top of the Morpho butterfly wing and you can obtain this quantitative information about the disease.”
She is excited to explore how they can harness these unique nanostructures, which also occur naturally in other parts of nature.
“The Morpho butterfly wing is one example, but there are many other beautiful examples of this so-called structural color in nature — for instance, in beetle shells, other butterfly wings, bird feathers and many more examples,” Poulikakos said. “I think it’s really a beautiful resource that we can tap into to come up with much more accessible and quantitative ways to understand the origin and progression of fibrotic diseases and help patients worldwide.”
The researchers analyzed human breast cancer biopsy samples provided by study collaborators Jing Yang, a professor in the Departments of Pharmacology and Pediatrics at UC San Diego School of Medicine and co-leader of the Cancer Biology and Signaling Program at Moores Cancer Center, and Aida Mestre-Farrera, a postdoctoral scientist in Yang’s group.
“It was really exciting to be part of such a creative project and idea. I’m really happy because it’s such a creative way in which we can solve some issues that we have; because basically if we want to obtain the same type of information, we need a lot of infrastructure and really expensive imaging technology or microscopes,” Mestre-Farrera said. “So [the Morpho butterfly wing] in the future could be a really nice approach, so that hospitals who don’t have this sort of facility can do this type of analysis.”
Their current study mainly looked at breast cancer samples, but they believe the method could also analyze a broader range of fibrotic diseases — potential Kirya can’t wait to uncover.
“When these butterflies evolved to develop these structures, they weren’t thinking about improving human science but that’s something that we’re able to do and that doesn’t stop being fascinating,” she said.