Scanning For Cancer
Kerry A. Dolan, Forbes, August 15, 2005
Three years ago PARC scientists stumbled onto a surprising insight: Combining laser techniques with a whisk-broom bundle of fiber-optic threads enables incredibly accurate detection of traveling cancer cells, at a much faster pace than current screening allows. The approach also employs a digital microscope to further home in on the pinpointed cancer cells. Since then the resulting system, known as a FAST (Fiber Array Scanning Technology) cytometer, has been tested on blood samples from just 23 patients.
PARC's pursuit of better medicine began in 2002, when it joined with the Scripps Research Institute of La Jolla, Calif. to form the Scripps-PARC Institute for Advanced Biomedical Sciences. One of the first of ten challenges posed by Scripps President Richard Lerner was to devise a way to detect rare traveling tumor cells.
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