Health

Device Helps Determine If Cancer Treatment Working

BOSTON (WBZ) ― Local researchers have developed a new device that could help revolutionize cancer treatment. It can allow doctors to if treatment is working, without a biopsy.

Doctors hope this new machine may give Janice Sweeney more time with her family. Sweeney is being treated for advanced cancer that has spread throughout her body. "To hear that I had lung cancer, especially such advanced lung cancer that had spread to so many places was shocking. Devastating."

Doctors at mass general are conducting trials with something called a CTC machine. Using just a tablespoon of Sweeney's blood, it can determine if her cancer is spreading or if the chemotherapy is working -- without having to wait to do another biopsy after the treatment is complete.

"It's a way of analyzing the tumor," explains Dr. Daniel Haber of Mass. General Hospital. "Doing a biopsy without doing a biopsy. It's a non-invasive way of following cancer over time."

The machine works by counting the number of cancer cells in a patient's blood. "If we follow a patient over time, when they tend to respond to treatment, the number of cells seems to drop," said Haber. "When the tumor… If the tumor starts to grow back, the number of cells starts to go up again."

In the future, doctors hope the same machine may even be able to detect very early cancers and Sweeney shares their hopes. "If they had this test a couple of years ago, maybe I would have been diagnosed earlier and the treatment wouldn't have been quite as aggressive or as expensive or invasive."

Doctors hope this diagnostic tool will be available in hospitals around the country in just a few years.

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