Original broadcast date: May 31, 2009

How well can cancer specialists, oncologists, assess how well a particular treatment is destroying a tumour? It is true that there are methods to make this determination but it could take weeks of observation before knowing whether the tumour has shrunk.

Is it possible to develop a means of detecting the efficacy of a treatment by looking at the cancer at the cellular level? Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine in California reported in a study published in the April 12 online issue of the journal Nature Medicine an approach that may just answer this question.

• Dr. Dan Felsher, M.D., Ph.D. associate professor of medicine (oncology) and pathology and the leader of the Stanford Molecular Therapeutics Program, Stanford University School of Medicine and oncologist at the Stanford Cancer Center and senior study author