New test can assess if cancer treatment is working

A new blood test can detect changes in cancer cells, which will help doctors determine if a patient's treatment is working. Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in Boston have found that placing just a teaspoon of blood on a device called a CTC-chip, is enough for scientists to view tumour cells circulating in the bloodstream. The cells can be counted to determine if a patient's drug therapy is working, and can be observed for mutations.

"The CTC-chip opens up a whole new field of studying tumours in real time," Dr. Daniel Haber, director of the MGH Cancer Center and the study's senior author, said in a statement.

"When the device is ready for larger clinical trials, it should give us new options for measuring treatment response, defining prognostic and predictive measures, and studying the biology of blood-borne metastasis, which is the primary method by which cancer spreads and becomes lethal."

The researchers studied this test on lung cancer patients and found that it could accurately detect changes in cancer cells. Their research is published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The next area of study will be to determine the accuracy of the test by using it on patients with a variety of different cancers. If successful, doctors would be able to find out in a few days whether a patient is responding to treatment.

"If tumour genotypes don't remain static during therapy, it's essential to know exactly what you're treating at the time you are treating it," Haber said. "Biopsy samples taken at the time of diagnosis can never tell us about changes emerging during therapy or genotypic differences that may occur in different sites of the original tumour, but the CTC-chip offers the promise of noninvasive continuous monitoring."