Therapies San francisco: Researchers are using robots to detect and eliminate cancer cells that remain hidden after treatment, potentially accelerating the discovery of more effective therapies that could delay or prevent relapse. According to Oman News Agency, these 'persister' cells are rare - no more than one in every thousand cancer cells - and difficult to identify, yet they can drive cancer recurrence. Working with lung cancer samples, the researchers identified nearly 10,000 cellular variations that may help cancer cells 'escape' the effects of treatment. They wanted to test varying doses of drugs already identified as potential treatments for persister lung cancer cells, but the experiments would have required 10,000 separate tests, each taking a week. Instead, they designed a robotic platform containing thousands of miniature tumours in laboratory dishes within controlled incubators. A robotic arm then transferred the dishes between experimental stations. Nine of the 94 drugs tested showed consistent effect iveness, the researchers said, suggesting that persister cells may share common vulnerabilities even when they emerge in patients receiving different treatments. 'We expected each tumour to behave as its own special case,' said Steve Altschuler, lead author of the report from the University of California, San Francisco. 'Instead, we found consistent patterns across many different samples, suggesting there may be underlying rules that could help predict which treatments are likely to be effective,' he added.