If this technique fulfills its promise, one day soon a lab would receive a tumor tissue sample shipped to us in the morning and have the sample analyzed and typed in time to ship back overnight to the physician making the follow-up treatment decisions. What now takes weeks or months, with results sometimes coming too late to be useful in treatment decisions, could be done in a matter of hours for a fraction of the current cost. |
Measuring prognostic markers in breast cancer cells opens up possibilities for broad applications of this technology to tissue samples obtained from needle or surgical biopsies of patients with suspected breast cancers. Furthermore, it's possible this approach may also be applied to a broad range of other solid tumors, including colon, ovarian, prostate and gastric cancer, to name a few. |
Targeted cancer therapies, therapies that exploit the particular weaknesses of different types of cancer, show enormous promise for the next generation of cancer treatment. It's not practical to wait weeks after breast cancer surgery, for example, to decide how aggressive follow-up treatment should be. The effectiveness of many therapies depends on timing. |