New chip could improve cancer treatment

Cancer spreads via circulating tumour cells (CTCs) that travel through the blood to other organs and are nearly impossible to track. Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology believe their detection method could lead to earlier and more targeted treatment, beginning with a simple blood test.

When a tumour starts metastasising, it sheds its cell into the blood. An individual cell often does not survive the bloodstream on its own, but clusters of cells are much more robust and can travel to other organs, effectively pushing the cancer to a metastatic state.

CTCs have proven difficult to study, let alone treat. Blood contains billions of cells per millilitre, and only a handful of those cells would be CTCs in a patient with metastatic cancer. Such intense filtration has been inaccessible using conventional lab methods. Most traditional filtration is too aggressive and would break the cluster back into single cells, ruining the ability to study the effect of a cluster.