科学家开发出了一种发现癌细胞的技术，它运作更迅速而且比目前大多数测试需要的样本数量更少。这种他们称之为诊断磁共振（DMR）的技术可以让内外科医生在手术和其他情况下用相对简单的注射器提取的方法迅速发现癌细胞。
Ralph Weissleder及其同事利用设计成与癌特异细胞表面标记结合的磁纳米颗粒标记了癌细胞。然后可以用一种便携式的磁共振扫描仪探测这些纳米颗粒，显示出样本中的癌细胞存在于何处以及有多少癌细胞。利用这种方法，这组作者有能力在15分钟内在一份实验性的活检样本中发现最少2个癌细胞。这种速度可以让病理学家在手术中迅速做出切除一个患者多少组织的决定。这组科学家提出，这个技术也可以用于监测原发性癌症和转移肿瘤的进展以及耐药性。（生物谷Bioon.com）
生物谷推荐原始出处：
PNAS July 20, 2009, doi: 10.1073/pnas.0902365106
Rapid detection and profiling of cancer cells in fine-needle aspirates
Hakho Leea,1, Tae-Jong Yoona,1, Jose-Luiz Figueiredoa, Filip K. Swirskia and Ralph Weissledera,b,2
There is a growing need for fast, highly sensitive and quantitative technologies to detect and profile unaltered cells in biological samples. Technologies in current clinical use are often time consuming, expensive, or require considerable sample sizes. Here, we report a diagnostic magnetic resonance (DMR) sensor that combines a miniaturized NMR probe with targeted magnetic nanoparticles for detection and molecular profiling of cancer cells. The sensor measures the transverse relaxation rate of water molecules in biological samples in which target cells of interest are labeled with magnetic nanoparticles. We achieved remarkable sensitivity improvements over our prior DMR prototypes by synthesizing new nanoparticles with higher transverse relaxivity and by optimizing assay protocols. We detected as few as 2 cancer cells in 1-μL sample volumes of unprocessed fine-needle aspirates of tumors and profiled the expression of several cellular markers in <15 min.
