Drop of blood may test for cancer

STANFORD, Calif., April 13 (UPI) -- U.S. researchers are developing a technique that uses a drop of blood to diagnose cancers and assess their response to treatment.

Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine used a specialized machine capable of analyzing whether individual cancer-associated proteins were present in the tiny samples, and even whether modifications of the proteins varied in response to cancer treatments.

Dr. Alice Fan, an oncologist, said that although the study focuses on blood cancers, the hope is the technique might also provide a faster, less invasive way to track solid tumors.

"Currently, we don't know what's going on in a patient's actual tumor cells when a treatment is given," Fan said in a statement. "The standard way we measure if a treatment is working is to wait several weeks to see if the tumor mass shrinks. It would really be a leap forward if we could detect what is happening at a cellular level."

Fan, the lead author of the study, performed the research in the laboratory of Dr. Dean Felsher, the senior author and leader of the Stanford Molecular Therapeutics Program.

The findings are published in the online version of Nature Medicine.