Despite recent years’ dramatic improvements in cancer treatment, cancer remains second only to heart disease as a leading cause of death for Americans. But a new Nature Communications paper has reported exactly the kind of breakthrough that cancer patients yearn for: development of a highly sensitive new method for performing a liquid biopsy that can identify tiny numbers of individual cancer molecules.

Current medical diagnostics involve sending samples to laboratory facilities, which can be difficult and expensive. Researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have designed a desk-sized instrument that can make the same measurements at the location where the samples are collected.