In: Biology
During lung cancer metastasis, small numbers of cells break away and move to new tissue. As a clinician, you suspect some of these cells may be found in the circulatory system. Can you think of and describe a method of how you can confidently identify these cells in a blood sample of the patient?
It is really a critical job to find the cancer cells in a blood sample as the blood cells are also present in the sample and there are many types of blood cells.So it is really difficult to short out the cancer cells from the blood sample.
But we can make a culture for the cancer cells to confirm that the cells are present or not in the blood sample.As cancer cells have a very unique property is that it can very easily and quickly grow in the culture media.
So if we take the blood sample and put them in the culture plate and if the cells are present in the sample then those particular cancer cells will raidly grow in number and as the cells are in metastasis stage that means it is able to migrate or move,so in the culture we can see their movement through vediography.
In this method we can easly confirm that the sample is cancer positive or not with in 48-72 hour,as the cancer cells need only few hour to multiply.