A Stanford University School of Medicine team has for the first time used specially designed dye-containing nanoparticles to simultaneously monitor changes in two intracellular proteins that play crucial roles in the development of cancer.

Successful development of the new technique may improve scientists’ ability to diagnose cancers — for example, by determining how aggressive tumors’ constituent cells are — and to eventually separate living, biopsied cancer cells from one another based on characteristics indicating their stage of progression or their degree of resistance to chemotherapeutic drugs. That would expedite the testing of treatments targeting a tumor’s most recalcitrant cells.