Speeding Cancer Hunt

Tracking the spread of a patient’s cancer can resemble the proverbial search for the needle in the haystack.

ChromaVision Medical Systems Inc. of San Juan Capistrano says it is developing a system that could speed up the pathologist’s hunt through tissue slides for cancer cells that have migrated from a patient’s lung to the bone marrow. The company says its imaging system can save the doctor time by automatically combing through slides, looking for antibodies that are markers for hard-to-find cancer cells in the marrow.

Dr. Richard Cote, a researcher at USC’s Kenneth Norris Cancer Center, says the system accurately found such “occult” cells in slides of 17 patients whose lung cancer had spread to the bone marrow. Cote, an advisor to ChromaVision, says the system could cut the amount of time a pathologist spends assessing a patient’s slides to less than five minutes from the 45 minutes under the manual system.

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Barbara Marsh covers health care for The Times. She can be reached at (714) 966-7762 and at barbara.marsh@latimes.com.