Hope might be just a blood test away for the cancer community, thanks to a new test that can spot one cancerous cell amidst a plethora of healthy ones.

Physicians from the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston announced their discovery on January 4 and are collaborating with Johnson & Johnson to bring it to the market.

“It should have a huge impact,” Business technology teacher and breast cancer survivor Debbie Rassner said. “It will help the patient and their doctors to plan out a treatment protocol that will hopefully be extremely effective in combating the disease.”

The isolation of cancer cells in blood usually means that a tumor has or is likely to spread. This blood test uses a microchip covered with 78,000 microscopic posts that target the cancerous cells, allowing researchers to count and analyze them.

“It doesn’t matter how many billions of cells are present in a tumor, they all descended from a single cell,” Amira Elkholy, a registered nurse at Palmetto General Hospital, said. “So if this new research can find that one cell before it starts to change, then it could be the solution.”

Johnson & Johnson has invested $30 million in hopes of opening it to the market within five years. They hope that this could provide an early detection for people, and since doctors can now individually analyze cancer cells, it should aid them into choosing which medicine to use.

“I’m pretty optimistic about this,” Elkholy said. “It’s really going to shed some light for people and doctors on cancer.”

Sometimes a person’s cancer is caught when it is too late, and doctors can only try a few different treatments. But the early detection of cancer cells steers the process into a faster direction.

“The faster they catch it the better, so if this test becomes available to people, then it could save a lot of lives,” senior John Schrage said.

But with a new invention comes an explosion of different opinions, and some are unsure of how this will affect people’s lives.

“My cancer was detected as a result of my annual mammograms,” Rassner said, “My concern is that people will use this test and if their blood comes up cancer free, they will assume that they will always be cancer free and stop going to their age-appropriate screening tests.”

The FDA and a few cancer centers will continue to study and experiment it, to see whether it will have its’ faults, or promising results.