Bespoke therapy

A probe that can show whether specific chemotherapy will be effective on an individual's cancer treatment could save the lives of patients and millions of pounds for the NHS, its developers claim.

was the brainchild of a scientist whose wife died of cancer despite undergoing chemotherapy that ultimately proved ineffective. He approached colleagues to help develop bespoke cancer treatments that are determined by the chemosensitivity of individual patient tumours.

According to Jim Bristow, Oncoprobe's chairman, the key to the device's success is that the measurement of responsiveness of individual cancer cells is carried out passively. 'We don't do anything to the cells, just take them from the body and put them into the sensor to be measured.'

Other methods involve growing a culture of cells, which can introduce changes in their characteristics as they adapt to environmental changes through each 'passage', or cycle of mitotic division; the number of cells per thousand actively dividing at a particular time.