Dedicated to Discovery. Committed to Care.

Advances at the Frontier Advances at the Frontier of Cancer Diagnosis

Technology offers new opportunities for detecting and tracking disease
by Robert Levy

A photograph of

Advances in the diagnosis of cancer rarely make the news splash that advances in treatment do — which is ironic, because treatment breakthroughs are often dependent upon better diagnostic techniques.

Consider acute leukemia. A generation ago, only one form of the disease was known, but doctors today can distinguish among several types based on tiny variations within individual tumor cells. Once physicians know which type of the disease a patient has, they're better able to weigh the risks and benefits of different treatments. Is a patient most likely to benefit from standard chemotherapy, aggressive chemotherapy, or a bone marrow transplant? The more precise the diagnosis, the more reliable the answer.

The days when innovations in cancer diagnosis were upstaged by other advances may be about to come to an end. On the horizon is technology that will make it possible, researchers say, to measure the precise number of living and dead cancer cells in a patient's body. Such technology will enable doctors not only to detect cancer at earlier stages, but also to gauge the effectiveness of new therapies more quickly. Doctors will know, faster than at present, whether a particular therapy is working, and, if it isn't, whether an alternative should be tried.

While such devices probably won't be available for a decade or so, other technologies stand to have a more immediate impact. In this issue of Paths of Progress, we look at a few that are currently in use or under development by Dana-Farber physicians and scientists.

Paths of Progress, Winter/Spring 2000

Paths of Progress Archive

E-mail this page

Related articles

The art of diagnosing tumors — A brief history
The first clues to the disease that would later be known as cancer probably came from observing skin ulcers that didn't heal with standard treatments. An account of such a condition, written on an Egyptian papyrus in the 15th century B.C., constitutes one of the first known references to the disease.
Read more

Technology helps trace cells' genetic fingerprints
It's often said that cancer isn't one disease, but hundreds. If new research at Dana-Farber bears fruit, that may prove to be something of an underestimate.

Using equipment with the ungainly name "oligonucleotide microarrays," investigators are exploring whether cancer comes in more varieties — potentially many more — than is now recognized. They're taking the genetic "fingerprints" of tumor cells to determine whether differences in those fingerprints reflect differences in the way the cells behave and respond to treatment.
Read more