One of the loftier dreams of personalized medicine is to detect and eliminate tumors before they become life threatening--before they are even visible on medical images. Now a Cambridge, MA, startup called Quanterix is developing an extremely sensitive protein-detection technology that can count single molecules--and could potentially detect the trace amounts of characteristic proteins that tiny tumors release into the blood.

"The premise is to get diagnostics to the most sensitive level possible," says David Walt,

"If we could understand the baseline levels of proteins in the serum, it could be used to track the integrated health of a person over the course of life,"

Via Technology Review
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