Prostate cancer cells can be detected in the circulating blood by a range of methods
July 6th, 2008 Posted in prostate cancer diagnosisNew results from The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust in the UK show that counting the number of tumor cells circulating in the bloodstream of patients with castration-resistant prostate cancer can accurately predict how well they are responding to treatment.
At the ESMO Conference Lugano (ECLU) organized by the European Society for Medical Oncology, researchers showed that changes in the number of circulating tumor cells predicted the outcome after chemotherapy in this hard to treat cancer. Because these circulating cells have broken away from either primary tumors or metastatic sites in other parts of the body, they could potentially be used to help study the specific characteristics of the cancer and perhaps personalize therapy