Treating cancer is taxing, both mentally and physically. With that much discomfort, you want to ensure it’s actually working. Luckily, a recent Futurity article discussed a new blood test that tells you if the treatment is working. The goal is to speed up the evaluation process and allow doctors to tweak the treatment plan quickly to improve a patient’s chances of recovery.
The technique is called extracellular vesicle monitoring of small-molecule chemical occupancy and protein expression, or ExoSCOPE for short. It measures the extracellular vesicles that cancer cells secrete into the bloodstream as an indicator of drug effectiveness in solid tumors. The test requires a tiny amount of blood, and takes less than an hour to complete.
