Exciting News: Blood Test To Spot Cancer Gets Big Boost
Researchers are making progress on a blood test that can spot a single cancer cell among a billion healthy ones.
The health care company Johnson & Johnson says it will join scientists at Massachusetts General Hospital, where the test was invented, to try to bring the test to market within the next several years.
Researchers think the test has the potential to transform care of many types of cancer, especially breast, colon, prostate and lung.
Doctors hope to use it to determine what treatment would be best for a particular tumor, and to find out quickly if the treatment is working. Ultimately, the test may offer another way to screen for cancer besides the mammograms, colonoscopies and other methods used now. But that will require more study.
Dr. Gustav Magrinat with Moses Cone Regional Cancer Center in Greensboro said the new test is a small, but exciting and good step forward.
“It’s going to be able to save the actual cell, not just count it, and therefore you can do tests on that cell. For instance, is the cell still eating estrogen or not, maybe it stopped eating estrogen. Treating it with anti-estrogens won’t work,” said Dr. Magrinat.
“This has the potential to eventually be able to not only tell us if a treatment is working, but maybe really get us to where we want to go, which is what treatment is going to work,” he said.
The day will come when one blood test will reveal a whole host of results regarding things that we weren’t even looking for. I am still waiting for my smart card/DNA/medical history/personal info security card. It’ll be very interesting bc I am adopted and as such have 0 medical history from family. For all others in that situation, you can learn alot from your DNA. There are companies out there now like 23andme that charge about $1000.00 to analyze your DNA.