The traditional way of diagnosing if someone has cancer involves blood tests, medical imaging and taking tissue samples or biopsies. But now a team in Massachusetts are using blood tests alone to detect and monitor the disease.
T cell latching on to a cancer cell to kill it Photo: Malaghan Institute
Viktor Adalsteinsson Photo: (Juliana Sohn)
These so-called 'liquid biopsies' could also measure the effectiveness of treatments in real time, and help doctors decide on the best approach for fighting specific cancers.
"Our ultimate hope is to use blood biopsies to exhaustively search for and characterize even the smallest remnants of tumors," says Viktor Adalsteinsson from The Broad Institute.
"It unlocks the potential for a lot of studies that we couldn't do before.The technology will allow us to track the dynamics of cancer and understand the evolution of drug resistance, or the development of the metastatic state, in a way that isn't possible through surgical biopsies." Gad Getz, The Broad Institute
