Thursday, July 3, 2008

Let's play the cancer card!

No, no! I'm not referring to assigning people their careers or discriminating against them on the basis of their cells, as in one of my favorite movies, Gattaca. If you haven't seen it, you must!

When cancer is on the run (metastasis - spreading to other organs, finally causing death), let's play the cancer card! A new business-card-size silicon chip dotted with 80,000 microscopic posts, the posts covered by special molecules that capture malignant cells, seems to offer an inexpensive way to track cancer, count it, and treat it on an individual basis. Microfluidics? Wow!

Personalized medicine is here!

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