Targeted cancer therapies, therapies that exploit the particular weaknesses of different types of cancer, show enormous promise for the next generation of cancer treatment. It's not practical to wait weeks after breast cancer surgery, for example, to decide how aggressive follow-up treatment should be. The effectiveness of many therapies depends on timing.

Measuring prognostic markers in breast cancer cells opens up possibilities for broad applications of this technology to tissue samples obtained from needle or surgical biopsies of patients with suspected breast cancers. Furthermore, it's possible this approach may also be applied to a broad range of other solid tumors, including colon, ovarian, prostate and gastric cancer, to name a few.

If this technique fulfills its promise, one day soon a lab would receive a tumor tissue sample shipped to us in the morning and have the sample analyzed and typed in time to ship back overnight to the physician making the follow-up treatment decisions. What now takes weeks or months, with results sometimes coming too late to be useful in treatment decisions, could be done in a matter of hours for a fraction of the current cost.

The cancer was contained within the prostate and has been completely removed. We expect that his cancer is cured.

With a cancer patient, the person knows and is aware of a lot of the things going on. But in dementia patients, that is not the case.

Diagnosis of ovarian cancer is made so difficult, because the symptoms overlap with so many others for benign conditions that affect the over-50 age group. But, being aware of your body and noting when things change could save your life.