Tumors can betray their presence by making cells that enter the bloodstream. Look for these rare cells takes a keen eye and good luck, but now researchers have developed a tool that ups the chances of detection. The technique, described in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of tomorrow may eventually help doctors diagnose tumors earlier than current technology can -. Long before metastasis can take hold and frustrate effective therapies
necrotic cells by tumors represent only a fraction of minute blood or bone marrow, so that scientists need to meticulously comb through thousands cell cancer to find some of them. Jonathan Uhr, a microbiologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, and colleagues wanted to create an accurate census of fishing on cancer cells.
submicroscopic iron particles for bait, researchers coated with antibodies that bind to specific types of cancer cells. Then, they mixed the bait with blood samples from 33 patients with breast cancer or prostate cancer and 13 healthy people. Exposing the samples to a magnetic field to a total of 15 minutes made the railway cells migrate together, allowing scientists to extract a portion of the sample in which the concentration of cancer cells was stimulated about 10,000 times.
using a technique called flow cytometry, in which a shooting laser beam through a single file cell stream reveals clues to their size and make-up, the researchers were able to identify and precisely match the cells cancer of each sample in as little as 2.5 hours. The technique has found that suspicious cells, as expected, were much more numerous in all cancer patients than in healthy individuals. Other tests have ruled out cancer in healthy controls. The number of cancer cells have been possible using traditional techniques, the researchers say.
"It is precisely the kind of test we needed was" nab circulating cancer cells more effectively, said David Brown, a pathologist at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Uhr The group will then monitor people at high risk, such as women with a family history of breast cancer, and to test the ability of the method to identify tumor cells in early stages of cancer development.
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