UC SANTA BARBARA (US) — New laser technology can discriminate between cancerous prostate cells in bodily fluids from those that are healthy—and may ultimately help doctors determine when cancer will spread.
“There have been studies to find the relationship between the number of cancer cells in the blood and the outcome of the disease,” says Alessia Pallaoro, postdoctoral fellow of chemistry and biochemistry at University of California, Santa Barbara and the study’s first author. “The higher the number of cancer cells there are in the patient’s blood, the worse the prognosis.”
“The cancer cells that are found in the blood are thought to be the initiators of metastasis,” Pallaoro says. “It would be really important to be able to find them and recognize them within blood or other bodily fluids. This could be helpful for diagnosis and follow-ups during treatment.”