TU Dublin researchers create pioneering technology in early breast cancer detection
As the world observes World Cancer Day on February 4th 2026, under the theme ‘United by Unique’, a research team from the Photonics Research Centre (PRC) at TU Dublin are developing new ways to detect breast cancer earlier with people and their individual stories at the heart of their research.
The theme for World Cancer Day 2025–2027 reminds us that cancer is more than a medical diagnosis. It is a call for care that treats people as individuals and combines scientific excellence with compassion and empathy. For researchers at PRC, this philosophy shapes their focus on one of the most crucial moments in cancer care: early detection.
Finding breast cancer at its earliest stages can be life changing. When the disease is detected early, treatment options are wider, recovery is more likely and survival rates improve significantly. Yet current methods still have limits. Imaging scans and laboratory tests can be expensive and time consuming, and sometimes cancer related changes only become visible once the disease has already progressed.
Biomarker based diagnostics, which aim to identify specific molecules linked to cancer, hold considerable promise, but current technologies often struggle with accuracy, speed and reliability, limiting their routine clinical use.
At the PRC, a team led by Dr. Anand VR, alongside Prof Yuliya Semenova and Mr Rodion Dobretsov, is seeking to overcome these barriers through the development of a highly sensitive biosensing platform designed specifically to detect breast cancer biomarkers at very low levels. The research is funded by the Research Ireland Pathways Programme via their project ‘Novel photonic biosensing platform for rapid and highly sensitive detection of cancer biomarkers.’
The team’s approach focuses on creating a compact, label-free sensing system capable of detecting extremely small biological signals quickly and accurately. By combining complementary optical techniques into a single platform, their research aims to reduce false readings and improve confidence in test results.
Crucially, the research is being developed with future clinical translation in mind. The sensing platform will be designed to be compatible with miniaturised fluid-handling technologies, opening pathways toward practical diagnostic tools that could one day be used in clinical laboratories or point-of-care settings.
For clinicians and patients alike, such advances could help shift detection further upstream identifying disease before symptoms emerge and before more invasive interventions are required.
The work under way at TU Dublin shows how research can respond not only to the science of cancer, but also to the lived experiences of those affected by it, where earlier detection can mean the difference between prolonged treatment and timely recovery, between fear and reassurance, and between uncertainty and hope.