Recent news about a blood test to detect cancer created a lot of excitement on the evening news but the reality is clinical use of this test is still a ways off. Scientists have known for years that tumor cells can break off from a tumor and circulate through the blood. Research has long looked for tools to “capture” these cells and utilize them in understanding how cancers spread and how to improve patient care.
What is unique about this test is the ability to capture individual cancer cells and analyze them for certain characteristics that may lead to more targeted treatments. Clinical trials of the test are being used in patients with cancer to assess the effectiveness of treatment and can respond more quickly to changes in tumor cell counts than they can in MRI or CT scans.
Its use as a screening tool to identify cancer in people who are otherwise healthy is the biggest question to be answered. As Dr. Susan Love commented in the ABC News report,
“We all have some cancer cells in our bodies that are dormant and not really causing any problem. What we have to be careful of, with this new technique, is over treating the dormant cells that were never going to give us any problem in our attempt to get every cancer cell that we see.”Some of these cancers will never harm us. So the question is: if you find them, how would you treat them? Would it make sense to treat a person with chemotherapy and radiation on the basis of a few circulating tumor cells?
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