Study of trace elements concentration in cancerous and healthy Bladder, Colon and Lung tissues

Cancer is one of the leading causes of death in developed and developing countries, where the incidence continues to increase each year. Annually about 8 million people die due to this disease. Hence, the development of efficient treatments, that fall short nowadays, is highly necessary. Therefore it is imperative to fully understand the biological and physiological processes intrinsic to the carcinogenesis. Trace elements may have an important role in this process, being responsible for healthy cellular growth mechanisms. These elements are responsible for a variety of metabolic processes, knowing, for instance, that they are components of different enzymes and catalysts of chemical interactions in living cells, among many others. At the biological level, they are also responsible for the activation or inhibition of enzymatic reactions and changes in the permeability of cell membranes. In addition, they appear in different concentrations in healthy and cancerous tissues due to biological changes induced by the disease. In order to measure the elements’ concentration and distribution it is necessary to resort to a specific technique, X-ray Fluorescence Spectrometry, a multi elemental analysis that relates X-ray Emission Spectra to specific elements and its concentration. The spectrometer used was M4 Tornado, from Bruker, an instrument that allies non-destructive techniques with high lateral resolution, able to conduct a quantitative and qualitative analysis even when the concentrations are at the μg/g range. The main objective is to correlate the trace element concentrations variation between cancerous and healthy human tissues in order to both evaluate the influence of these variations in cancer development and these elements’ expression due to carcinogenesis process