There are many reasons why in the era of cutting-edge medicine it is still difficult to cure cancer. A tumor may, for instance, consist of different tumor cell sub-populations, each of which has its own profile and responds differently to therapy – or not. Furthermore, the cancer cells and the healthy cells in the body interact and communicate with one another. How a tumor then actually develops and whether metastases form depends on which signals a tumor cell receives from its environment. With the development of a new method a team of researchers has succeeded in comprehensively profiling and visualizing tumor cells from patient samples.

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Source: University of Zurich. “Homing in on cancer with new imaging method.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 3 March 2014.