Research: Alternative to Biopsy

This is very cool. Stanford researchers have developed a blood testing device that will potentially detect cancer, using a tiny drop of blood (about as big as the period at the end of this sentence, they say). The full article is here.


The device works by testing for the proteins present in cancer cells. It can detect a sample as small as a picogram -- one trillionth of a gram. (I can't even give you a comparison for that -- imagine cutting a raisin into a trillion pieces. See? You can't even imagine it.)


The science for this is kind of complicated (though explianed a little better in this British newspaper article), but the point is, this gets at more of that "personalization" that is the trend in cancer research. Instead of giving a treatment and waiting days or even weeks, and then giving a scan to see if a tumor has shrunk, this device will be able to test changes in the proteins on the surface of the cancer cell.


There isn't enough detail in the articles (and maybe not enough detail from the studies yet) to know if a biopsy would be completely unnecessary. For NHL, for example, there needs to be a biopsy to determine which of the 30 or so different NHLs is present in the sample. The appearance of the cells helps determine which type the patient has. But they are pushing this especially as a biopsy alternative, so maybe they've got all of that figured out.


The initial tests used blood because they were looking at lymphomas. Further tests will look at solid tumors.


It's potentially a small change, but a crucial one. As someone who's had a node biopsy and a bone marrow biopsy, I'd be grateful enough just to be able to avoid those. But the potential for monitoring treatment effectiveness seems pretty big to me.