Researchers develop new HD blood test to detect cancer in blood

Scripps researchers have found a way to detect cancer in blood that could be comparable to surgical biopsy. The new technique finds and analyzes circulating tumor cells (CTCs), the cells that breakaway from solid tumors. The test is called HD-CTC because it gives a high-definition look at patients’ cells using a digital microscope and an image-processing algorithm to separate out the cells with sizes and shapes unlike those of healthy cells. “It significantly boosts our ability to monitor, predict, and understand cancer progression, including metastasis, which is the major cause of death for cancer patients,” says Professor Peter Kuhn, PhD, the primary inventor of the high-definition blood test. Other CTC tests requite extra steps in which the suspected CTCs are concentrated, which ends up excluding some cells, while HD-CTC has been shown to be a more complete analysis.