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Cancer diagnostics

One-stop shop

Nature volume 450, pages 1168–1169 (2007)Cite this article

Detecting cancer early and monitoring its progress non-invasively are high on oncologists' agenda. So the design of a neat device that detects and counts cancer cells shed into the blood by tumours is a welcome advance.

A hallmark of carcinomas — malignant tumours of epithelial tissues such as breast and colon — is the invasion of neighbouring tissues at an early stage of tumour growth. This process is associated with the shedding of tumour cells into the bloodstream. So counting and characterizing such circulating tumour cells to monitor the progress of the disease might be the most viable alternative to the unacceptable process of repeated, invasive biopsies. On page 1235 of this issue, Nagrath et al.1 report the development of an efficient and selective method for isolating these rare cells using microchip technology.

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References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Jonathan W. Uhr is in the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, 6000 Harry Hines Boulevard, Dallas, Texas 75390-8576, USA. jonathan.uhr@utsouthwestern.edu,

    Jonathan W. Uhr

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  1. Jonathan W. Uhr
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Uhr, J. One-stop shop. Nature 450, 1168–1169 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/4501168a

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/4501168a

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