LOS ANGELES, Dec. 13 (Xinhua) -- "Nanosensors," a blood-based technology, can spot early signs of cancer, according to a new study.

    By taking everyday blood samples from patients, the device can lead to quicker detection and treatment, said the study, whose findings were published online Dec. 13 in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

    The sensors were developed by researchers at the Yale Institute for Nanoscience and Quantum Engineering in New Haven, Conn.

    The device hunted for and picked up biomarkers for prostate and breast cancers, according to study co-author Mark Reed, associate director at the institute.

    The technology "can generally be applied to many other types of biomarkers," said Reed.

    "The real achievement here was demonstrating this with blood, which was a longstanding goal," Reed explained. "It could not be done before because blood has too much salt and other stuff in it, which prevents this type of sensing. We developed a method to filtrate out specifically what we want to detect."

    Only small amounts of blood were needed and the process took all of 20 minutes, according to Reed.

    "From a personalized medicine point of view, you could take a spot of blood from a finger prick and get results within minutes," said William C. Phelps, program director of Translational and Preclinical Cancer Research at the American Cancer Society.

    "It would be simple, stable and relatively inexpensive."

    "There's a crying need for things like this in lung cancer, where you would want to be able to detect biomarkers in a sputum sample, and pancreatic and ovarian cancer," Phelps said. "You can't really detect these early, so they're very hard to treat," he noted.

    "You want to detect a particular protein in the blood that's indicative of disease and you want to detect it early with high specificity and accuracy. You don't want false-positives or false-negatives," Phelps added.

    Although the technology has yet to make it to the doctor's office, it is revolutionary in more than one way, experts say.

    Previous technologies work in much the same way, but can only detect biomarkers in purified solutions, not the real thing -- meaning fluid samples from patients.