Blood test will be able to detect one cancer cell among a billion healthy cells.

Stray cancer cells in the blood mean that a tumor has spread or is likely to, many doctors believe. A test that can capture such cells has the potential to transform care for many types of cancer, especially breast, prostate, colon and lung.

Initially, doctors want to use the test to try to predict what treatments would be best for each patient’s tumor and find out quickly if they are working.

“This is like a liquid biopsy” that avoids painful tissue sampling and may give a better way to monitor patients than periodic imaging scans, said Daniel Haber, chief of Massachusetts General Hospital’s cancer center and one of the test’s inventors. Ultimately, the test may offer a way to screen for cancer besides mammograms, colonoscopies and other less-than-ideal methods used now.

“There’s a lot of potential here, and that’s why there’s a lot of excitement,” said Mark Kris, lung cancer chief at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. Sloan-Kettering is one of the sites that will study it this year.

Via Times of India