Dr. Kerry Courneya

So this whole idea of can we find them earlier through blood tests, what they're calling liquid biopsies.

And this is an area of a lot of research now where they're trying to develop these blood tests to detect small numbers of circulating tumor cells or small numbers of circulating tumor DNA.

Because these cancer cells will grow, divide, undergo cell death as well, and they'll shed some elements into the system.

But this is very experimental.

It's not being used in clinical practice right now, but there's a ton of research on these blood tests and liquid biopsies.

So that would revolutionize cancer care if we can actually go in at the time, you know, do a surgery, remove the tumor,

and then test a few weeks later to say, are there any elements of circulating tumor cells still around, giving us an indication, okay, well, maybe we need further treatments with chemotherapy or immunotherapy.

So it would revolutionize the field, but it's not in clinical practice yet.

It's probably too early for the science, so you're talking about using it on sort of the prevention side of things or the early detection side of things as opposed to the treatment recurrence side of things.

Just reading a study today in colon cancer, they've got a blood test now out for colon cancer.

They're comparing it to colonoscopy because that's the gold standard way we detect colonoscopy.

And it is fairly effective.

It was like 80% sensitivity and 90% specificity, but they still were not recommending that for the general population.

But I think it's coming down the pipeline.

I mean, if it is available privately and you want to get that test done, you know, you want to check with your doctor in terms of how to interpret it and make sure you're looking at things properly.

But I think that technology is coming down the road and it may not be too many more years when the average person is getting a blood test on the early detection side of things.

So on the post-diagnosis, the recurrence side of things, it is being used in clinical practice to some extent.

So their oncologist may already be recommending that.

So I would check with your oncologist to see if that is something that's recommended.

The whole advantage, the idea of this is...