SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 19 (Xinhua) -- A new study led by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine indicates that profiling the genes of lung-tumor cells from patient blood samples may be a cheap, noninvasive way to help doctors choose the right treatments.
The researchers created a system for isolating circulating tumor cells from the blood of cancer patients and reading a handful of genes from inside each tumor cell, enabling them to obtain genetic information about the original cancer tumor that resides deep in the lungs without doing a biopsy, which can be dangerous for the patient.
It is common for cancer therapies to fail after a few months, often because the cancer evolves resistance to the treatment. At that point, "without a biopsy and genetic profiling, we are flying blind, trying to select a second or third option for therapy and hoping it works," said radiology instructor Seung-min Park, a lead author of the study published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. But repeated lung biopsies are too hard on patients.
Finding a way to look at circulating tumor cells, or CTCs, in the blood has been a goal of oncologists for years. When people die of cancer, it is usually from metastasis, the spread of tumors throughout the body. Part of metastasis is the entry of tumor cells into the bloodstream, where they circulate along with normal blood cells, eventually landing in other organs and initiating tumors there.
【国际英语资讯:Blood test holds promise for cheaper, better way for managing lung cancer】相关文章:
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