Cancer monitor

Surgical removal of a tissue sample is now the standard for diagnosing cancer.

Such procedures, known as biopsies, are accurate but only offer a snapshot of the tumour at a single moment in time.

Monitoring a tumour for weeks or months after the biopsy, tracking its growth and how it responds to treatment, would be much more valuable, says Michael Cima, professor of materials science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who has developed an implantable device that can do just that.

Cima and his colleagues recently reported that their device successfully tracked a tumour marker in mice for one month.

Such implants could one day provide up-to-the-minute information about what a tumour is doing - whether it is growing or shrinking, how it is responding to treatment, and whether it has metastasised or is about to do so.

'What this does is basically take the lab and put it in the patient,' said Cima, who is also an investigator at the David H Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT.