Cancer Diagnostics--Moving Forward, Slowly

After years of false hope and disappointment, cancer diagnostics research again holds promise—albeit of a fragile kind. The sheer volume of funding and attention devoted to proteomics and genomics, along with advances in research tools, have led to new approaches to looking for and developing assays. Although few of these have come to market and none have gone before the FDA for approval, the gains in understanding of cancer biology are real, the attention being devoted to the field is on the rise, and hence the potential is increasing for the emergence of promising markers—or so the logic goes.

If the field was sputtering along for much of the 1990s, bogged down in confusion, lack of new ideas, and...