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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…