Diagnostics: Detect cancer in your blood

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Cancer can grow in numerous places in body tissues and poses a huge threat to our health. However, if cancer growth could be detected early, the chances of beating it would be more realistic. The Broadband Infrared Diagnostics (BIRD) research team in the attoworld group of the Chair of Laser Physics at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU) reports in its latest article in the science magazine eLife that infrared spectroscopy can be harnessed to detect molecular traces left by tissue tumours in our bloodstream.

Marinus Huber, Kosmas V Kepesidis, Liudmila Voronina, Frank Fleischmann, Ernst Fill, Jacqueline Hermann, Ina Koch, Katrin Milger-Kneidinger, Thomas Kolben, Gerald B Schulz, Friedrich Jokisch, Jürgen Behr, Nadia Harbeck, Maximilian Reiser, Christian Stief, Ferenc Krausz, Mihaela Zigman. Infrared molecular fingerprinting of blood-based liquid biopsies for the detection of cancer. eLife research article