A new non-surgical technique developed at Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center, snagging lung cancer cells from a blood sample, could offer doctors one day the possibility of better tailor cancer treatments and monitor tumors in “real time.”

The new technique may also aid in the detection of cancers that are likely to spread. Currently, patients would have to undergo dangerous, invasive procedures to sample tissues and cells in order to find out whether they have lung cancer or if their cancer is spreading to other parts of their body.

The “CTC chip,” as the technology was named, uses a microchip scanner, no bigger than a business card. The chip has 80,000 “columns” coded with an antibody that acts like a “glue” to capture tumor cells that may slip into the blood, Daniel Haber, director of the cancer center at Massachusetts General Hospital and author of a pilot study published online in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The device was used only on 27 patients with non-small cell lung cancer, 23 of them having a cell-surface mutation known as the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) mutation.

With the help of the CTC chip, the researchers were able to identify the mutation from the circulating blood tumor cells 92 percent of the time.

“The CTC-chip opens up a whole new field of studying tumors in real time. When the device is ready for larger clinical trials, it should give us new options of measuring treatment response, defining prognostic and predictive measures, and studying the biology of blood-borne metastasis, which is the primary method by which cancer spreads and becomes lethal,” Dr. Haber said in the paper.

Non-small-cell lung cancer is the deadliest form of lung cancer, killing more than 160,000 Americans annually, which accounts for 29 percent of all cancer deaths.