# A soft magnetoelastic microneedle patch for rapid skin cancer screening

> **NIH NIH R01** · UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES · 2024 · $350,773

## Abstract

PROJECT SUMMARY
Over 2.5 million skin cancers are diagnosed annually in the United States, more than all other forms of cancers
combined. Early diagnosis is critical; thus, we propose to develop a soft and wearable magnetoelastic
microneedle patch (MMP) for non-invasive and rapid skin cancer screening. It could perform fast scanning of the
spatial stiffness of skin lesions with depths of up to 5 mm. This concept is established on the basis of the PI’s
prior success in discovering the giant magnetoelastic effect in soft matter (Nat. Mater. 2021, 20, 1670). With a
fundamentally new working mechanism, the proposed soft MMP can cover a large detection area (7.7 cm2) and
have a high spatial resolution (1 mm, trained with super-resolution algorithm), high framerate (2000 Hz), and
ultrahigh sensitivity (<2 kPa). We hypothesize that the proposed soft MMP enables fast, non-invasive scanning
of skin stiffness of both lesions and borders spatially, which can be used experimentally and/or in clinics for skin
cancer early diagnosis and screening, longitudinal monitoring, and/or guiding cancer excisions. To test our
hypothesis, we propose three aims. Aim 1: Scalable design and optimization of a soft MMP for fast spatial
stiffness mapping. Aim 2: Validate the soft MMP via stiffness mapping in mice models with skin cancer. Aim 3:
Validate the soft MMP via stiffness mapping in excised human skin cancer.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10781736
- **Project number:** 1R01CA287326-01
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES
- **Principal Investigator:** Jun Chen
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2024
- **Award amount:** $350,773
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2024-04-01 → 2029-03-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10781736

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10781736, A soft magnetoelastic microneedle patch for rapid skin cancer screening (1R01CA287326-01). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-24 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10781736. Licensed CC0.

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