Cancer Diagnostics with comments from Dr. Gordon

The future of cancer diagnosis is changing rapidly. This new technique is very exciting and they mention that current techniques are woefully inadequate. This new approach is much faster and seems much more accurate. 

It does require taking a fine needle aspirate whereas cell search does not need biopsies but maybe the cell search technique will somehow become even better and could be synergistic with this new technique of protein analysis vs staining cells.

Although tumor cells obtained from human patients by image-guided intervention are a valuable source for diagnosing cancer, conventional means of analysis are limited. Here, we report the development of a Micro-NMR for Rapid Molecular Analysis of Human Tumor Samples
for rapid, multiplexed analysis of human tumors. We implemented the technology in a clinical setting to analyze cells obtained by fine-needle aspirates from suspected lesions in 50 patients and validated the results in an independent cohort of another 20 patients. Single fine-needle aspirates yielded sufficient numbers of cells to enable quantification of multiple protein markers in all patients within 60 min.