Comparison of mechanical properties of normal and malignant thyroid cells

Correlating the viscoelasticity of breast cancer cells with their malignancy

“…We also measured the Young's modulus obtained from force-distance curves of the stress relaxation test and the results confirm our earlier findings ( figure 2(e)). The trend of the Young's modulus seen across these cell lines is also comparable to the results obtained by other groups mentioned earlier [3,17,18,20,28]. However, it should be noted that the values obtained from various studies are not necessarily the same; this may be due to differences in the experimental setup.…”

“…For instance, using AFM, Li et al reported that malignant human breast cancer cell lines have a Young's modulus of up to 1.8 folds lower than the benign ones [20]. Another study has shown that cancerous thyroid cells are almost 3-5 folds more deformable than their normal counterparts [28]. In the case of ovarian cancer, cells are softer with greater migration and invasion abilities as compared to healthy ovarian cells [42].…”

Current status and perspectives in atomic force microscopy-based identification of cellular transformation

“…Complementary AFM nanomechanical-based analysis of several areas of healthy and cancer oligodendrocytes 52 showed that the elastic modulus of the nuclear regions of the cancer cells was lower than that of the cell periphery, with cancer cells being threefold softer than healthy cells. Similar results were obtained for malignant thyroid cells, 53 with the elastic analysis showing that such malignant cells were three-to fivefold softer relative to their primary and untransformed counterparts. 54 showed that HeLa cells were three times harder than MCF7 cells.…”

A frequency-based hypothesis for mechanically targeting and selectively attacking cancer cells

“…Importantly, they mostly fall within the range (10 4 , 10 6 ) Hz, an interval compatible with LITUS, which is already widely employed for medical applications. Peak frequency values outside this interval are found for the sole cases associated with extreme limit situations, that is, both when the cells behave as fluid-like (Maxwell) viscoelastic materials and exhibit the bladder cells [29] kidney cells [32] breast cells [30] prostate cells [30] thyroid cells [33] mouse ovarian epithelia [34] breast cells [35] prostate cells [36] bladder cells [29] breast cells [28] breast cells [26] cells of the lung [26] Figure 6. Bar chart with a synopsis of the theoretically derived in-frequency responses of healthy and cancer cells whose mechanical properties have been experimentally measured: the histograms compare peak frequencies for each tumour and normal cell line pair examined, by averaging over all the results obtained from the six viscoelastic schemes used.…”