A team led by Stanford researchers has developed a prototype blood scanner that can find cancer markers in the bloodstream in early stages of the disease, potentially allowing for earlier treatment and dramatically improved chances of survival.

A new "barcode chip" developed by researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) promises to revolutionize diagnostic medical testing. In less than 10 minutes, and using just a pinprick's worth of blood, the chip can measure the concentrations of dozens of proteins, including those that herald the presence of diseases like cancer and heart disease.

Researchers at National Jewish Health have identified a simple gene-based blood test that more accurately and quickly measures cystic fibrosis patients’ response to therapy than current tests.

Howard Hughes Medical Institute researchers have developed a new prenatal blood test that accurately detected Down syndrome and two other serious chromosomal defects in a small study of 18 pregnant women. If confirmed in larger trials, they say, the test would offer a safer and faster alternative to invasive prenatal tests such as amniocentesis that pose a small risk of miscarriage.

A simple blood test may help detect serious bacterial infections (SBIs) like urinary tract infections and blood stream infections in young infants who come to the emergency department (ED) with fevers that have no clear cause.

One day soon patients may spit in a cup, instead of bracing for a needle prick, when being tested for cancer, heart disease or diabetes. A major step in that direction is the cataloguing of the “complete” salivary proteome, a set of proteins in human ductal saliva, identified by a consortium of three research teams, according to an article published today in the Journal of Proteome Research.

Indiana University School of Medicine researchers have isolated biomarkers in the blood that identify mood disorders, a breakthrough that may change the way bipolar illness is diagnosed and treated. The report will be published in the February 26 advance online edition of the journal Molecular Psychiatry.

There are to date no objective clinical laboratory blood tests for mood disorders. The current reliance on patient self-report of symptom severity and on the clinicians’ impression is a rate limiting step in effective treatment and new drug development.

In an advance toward earlier diagnosis of cancer and other disorders, scientists are reporting development of a potentially fast, simple and inexpensive blood test to detect disease “biomarkers.” The study is scheduled for the Dec. 26 issue of ACS’ Journal of the American Chemical Society, a weekly publication.

Yale scientists have discovered a way to use a simple blood test that may accurately detect thoracic aneurysm disease (TAA), which gives little warning and is almost always fatal if untreated.

Mayo Clinic researchers have found that first-degree relatives (i.e., parents, siblings, children) of patients with primary biliary cirrhosis (PBC) are more likely to have the biomarker of the disease in their blood.

A simple test to diagnose Parkinson's disease (PD) before symptoms appear by measuring the levels of a protein in blood is being developed by researchers from the Howard Florey Institute, The University of Melbourne and The Mental Health
Research Institute of Victoria.