Cancer diagnoses traditionally require invasive or labor-intensive procedures such as tissue biopsies. Researchers at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU) have now reported on a method that uses pulsed infrared light to identify molecular profiles in blood plasma that could indicate the presence of some common cancers. In a proof-of-concept study, the team used machine learning to analyze blood plasma from more than 2,000 participants and link molecular patterns to lung cancer, extrapolating a potential “cancer fingerprint.”
Mihaela Žigman, PhD, at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics (MPQ) is corresponding author of the team’s published paper in ACS Central Science, titled “Electric-Field Molecular Fingerprinting to Probe Cancer.” In their report, the team concluded, “Our…