A routine, but highly sensitive, blood test may be able to detect cancer. Researchers from Stanford University School of Medicine have found a way to monitor levels of tumor DNA circulating in the blood. The researchers were able to accurately identify about 50 percent of patients with stage-1 lung cancer and all of the patients whose cancers were more advanced.
The new technique - which the Stanford team has named "CAPP-Seq" (Cancer Personalized Profiling by deep Sequencing) - is sensitive enough to detect just one molecule of tumor DNA in a sea of 10,000 healthy DNA molecules in the blood. Although the researchers focused on patients with non-small-cell lung cancer (which includes most lung cancers, including adenocarcinomas, squamous cell carcinoma and large cell carcinoma), the approach should be widely applicable to many different solid tumors throughout the body. It's also possible that it could one day be used not just to track the progress of a previously diagnosed patient, but also to screen healthy or at-risk populations for signs of trouble. (More at Physicians News)
This is not discussing breast but for every door that is opened, another one will then become one to be opened. It is promising.