edited by Lisa Lock, reviewed by Andrew Zinin
Multimodal imaging of tumor progression in lung cancer. Credit: Nature Biotechnology (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41587-026-03184-3
One of the biggest challenges in cancer research has been linking the “big picture” seen in medical scans with the microscopic biology that drives tumor growth and dictates how patients respond to treatment. Now, by combining multiple imaging techniques (PET scans, bioluminescence and fluorescence), scientists can detect tumors across the whole body simultaneously, pinpoint key targets and then examine those tumors in detail, including the surrounding cells and tissue.
Study lead Professor David Lewis of the Cancer Research UK Scotland Institute and University of Glasgow said, "This exciting technology allows us to build a clearer map of how cancer behaves at both a holistic and microscopic level.
“It allows researchers to follow tumors in the body, identify the lesions that matter and then zoom in to study those cancer cells and their environment, giving us new information about cancer that we can take forward into better and more precise treatments.”
In the U.K., more than 403,000 people are diagnosed with cancer each year (34,800 in Scotland), with around 170,000 people (16,400 in Scotland) dying from the disease annually, so finding new ways to tackle the disease is vital.
Cancer is not a static disease. Tumors grow, spread, interact with immune cells and blood vessels, and respond differently to treatments even within the same patient. Until now, scientists have had to study these processes in separate ways. Whole-body imaging techniques such as PET scans can show where tumors are and how they grow but lack the detail to reveal what individual cells are doing. In contrast, microscopy can capture cellular behavior but cannot show how cancer develops across the entire body.
This new approach connects those two worlds by linking large-scale imaging with cellular-level analysis, allowing researchers to better understand why tumors behave differently and why some respond to therapy while others do not. The study is published in the journal Nature Biotechnology.
Using this new approach, researchers can tag cancer cells, allowing them to be identified and tracked across different imaging techniques to observe how they grow and respond.
Importantly, it also makes it possible to investigate how tumor cells interact with their surroundings, including nearby immune cells and blood vessels—factors known to influence how cancer progresses and responds to treatment.
While the technology is currently available only for research use in mice, not human patients, it is helping scientists understand why treatments work for some tumors but not others, test new therapies more precisely, focus on individual lesions and develop imaging approaches that better reflect the underlying biology of cancer.
A Cancer Research UK spokesperson said, "This technology represents a new and powerful tool in our aim to understand cancer biology. Cancer behaves differently from person to person and even tumor to tumor, so having the knowledge that allows us to target each with the most effective treatment could be a game changer.
“Being able to see how cancer grows and develops at both a macro and micro level offers us new ways to find more precise ways to tackle and prevent cancer.”
The new approach also opens the door to more detailed preclinical testing, where tumors are no longer treated as biologically identical but studied individually. Although demonstrated in liver and lung cancer models, the researchers say the approach could be widely applied across multiple fields, including oncology, immunology, neuroscience and regenerative medicine.
From;
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-07-imaging-method-tracks-cancer-body.html