Inexpensive Cancer Screening

Image: Photograph courtesy of Dr. Jim Heath

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It hardly seems possible that a single drop of blood will give enough information to diagnose dread diseases such as cancer. Until now, a blood test to determine a patient's cancer risk took several vials of blood and hours or days to analyze, and cost about $500.

But a new method promises a test that would take about 10 minutes and could cost as little as a nickel.

The invention comes from chemist James Heath at the California Institute of Technology and Leroy Hood of the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, a pioneering inventor of gene sequencing technologies.

Hood says that this technology is a step forward for a new paradigm of health care that he has long advocated, a form of personalized medicine he calls the "4 P's"—predictive, preventive, personalized and participatory medicine.

"To make this a reality," Hood says of bespoke medicine, "we need to develop new technologies like this: to provide data on individuals that is cheap, specific and informative."

These scientists have founded a company, Integrated Diagnostics, to produce and sell their new blood-drop method. "This company is going to change medicine," says Hood, a scientific co-founder of the biotech giant Amgen and a cofounder of Applied Biosystems and several other companies.

The breakthrough uses an "integrated blood barcode chip" designed to separate out proteins from a patient's blood, and to run them through tiny channels coated with strips of DNA bound to antibodies that capture the proteins the researchers are looking for. The targeted proteins are then coated with a material that lights up under a fluorescent microscope.

In the current experiment, the researchers were looking for free-floating tumor cells that can sometimes foretell the future advent of cancer.

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