New Technology May Use Blood Test To Detect Cancer

BALTIMORE (WJZ) -- Imagine a simple blood test that will tell you if you have cancer.

Mary Bubala explains that you could soon get that test right at your own doctor's office.

It's being called a liquid biopsy.  Doctors say an experimental blood test is not only less painful than traditional biopsies, but it may be a much simpler and faster way to determine whether a patient's cancer treatment is working.

"What we'd like to do is go further than that: essentially interrogate the cells in the blood and look within hours or days of receiving a treatment...is it having an effect?" said Massachusetts Cancer Center Director Dr. Daniel Haber.

Scientists at Massachusetts General Hospital invented the blood test, which in preliminary trials was able to detect a single cancer cell among a billion healthy ones.

"There are some things that make these tumor cells different.  There are certain proteins on the surface that enable us to fish them out," Haber said.

The test uses a microchip that's covered in thousands of tiny posts.  When the chip comes in contact with a blood sample, the healthy cells bounce off the posts, but the cancer cells stick, singling them out, so researchers can study them.  For now, doctors plan to use the test to predict what treatments would be best for each patient's tumor.

Beyond that, doctors hope the test may one day be able to offer a much simpler way to screen for cancer than mammograms or colonoscopies.

"We may have a tool for early detection of cancer to find early cancers before they invade into the blood and spread to distant sites and that, of course, would be our dream," Haber said.

Scientists have teamed up with health care giant Johnson & Johnson to perfect the test.  Doctors think it will take at least another three to five years before it's widely available.

Two other hospitals in Boston and Houston are also taking part in these trials.