News Finding: The technique has the potential to apply to a broad range of cancers, so someday clinicians might be able not only to detect tumors, monitor the effectiveness of cancer therapies and guide the developments of anti-tumor drugs, but -- importantly -- to screen symptom-free populations for nascent tumors that might have otherwise gone undetected until they became larger and much tougher to treat.
Paper Finding: Another potential issue to consider for translation is whether the production of enough MC for a human dose is feasible.
News Context: The substance was easily detected 48 hours later by a simple blood test. The technique has the potential to apply to a broad range of cancers, so someday clinicians might be able not only to detect tumors, monitor the effectiveness of cancer therapies and guide the developments of anti-tumor drugs, but -- importantly -- to screen symptom-free populations for nascent tumors that might have otherwise gone undetected until they became larger and much tougher to treat. Complicating matters, these substances are also quite often made in healthy tissues, so a positive test result doesn't absolutely mean a person actually has cancer.
Paper Context: However, it also is quite possible that scaling across species will be nonlinear. Another potential issue to consider for translation is whether the production of enough MC for a human dose is feasible. Although the technology we used to generate our MCs yields amounts similar to those obtained with conventional plasmid preparations, and the MC production appears to be scalable , the ability to produce the amounts needed for human doses under GMP conditions remains to be fully validated.