Intelligent knife smokes out cancer

Surgery is a messy business, and for surgeons trying to remove tumours it’s hard to tell how much is too much. All of the cancer needs to be excised, but surgeons want to remove as little healthy tissue as possible. That led Zoltan Takats at Imperial College London, UK, to wonder if mass spectrometry could help.

‘What happens quite often,’ says Takats, ‘is we chemists develop something which we think is great for medicine or food chemistry, or forensics or so on, but it turns out people don’t really need our help.’ But in this case, he explains, it was the surgeons that got excited.

This article provides a link to coverage by Chemistry World