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Surgeons might soon have a much more reliable way of diagnosing and treating
liposarcomas, cancers of fatty tissue. These can go undetected even under a
microscope, because tumour tissue looks the same as fat. Now Samuel Singer and
his colleagues at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, have
discovered a better way to diagnose a type of tumour which accounts for a third
of all liposarcomas in the US. Biopsy samples undergo a spectroscopic technique
based on nuclear magnetic resonance. This measures the relative amounts of two
telltale metabolites. The ratio of these metabolites determines whether the
cells are cancerous or not (Journal of the American Chemical Society,
vol 123, p 9200).