Researchers at the Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston have invented a new technique by which they can identify cancer cells. The report published in the New England Journal of Medicine said a microchip scanner, the size of a business card was powerful enough to analyze a patients’ blood and find even one single cancer cell even if it is surrounded by a billion healthy blood cells. Researchers strongly believe that this could result in better treatments and fewer side effects.   

Current cancer treatment is used in the cases where the cancer has spread and secondary tumors are established. With the new device doctors hope to detect cancer much earlier and treat it faster.

"Right now you take your best guess as to what kind of treatment would work for a patient's cancer, give it to them for two or three months, and then repeat a CAT scan to see if it worked," said Dr. Daniel Haber of the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center and Harvard Medical School. "If there were a way of measuring an earlier response, that would be fantastic. The CTC chip offers the promise of non-invasive continuous monitoring," he added.

Although the chip is not ready for widespread use, it is 100 times more sensitive than the currently used U.S. FDA approved technique which uses magnetic beads.

"To me, as a scientist, this is huge. To be able to just do a blood test, that opens a whole new, wide world. It will give us a lead time to find out if the patient has stopped responding to treatment," said Dr. Shakun Malik, director of the lung cancer program at Georgetown University's Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center in Washington, DC.