People react differently to different drugs based on their genetic make-up. At the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, medical scientist Mike Malfatti says they’re using their accelerator mass spectrometer to test what’s called microdoses of chemotherapy drugs.

"Where you give the person a very low level dose, one one-hundredths of what the therapeutic dose would be. It has a carbon-14 label tag on it. And with the chemotherapeutic drug that we’re working with, it binds your DNA and then that will kill the tumor cells if you have a high degree of binding in the DNA. And if you have a high degree, it’s a good indication that you will hopefully respond favorably to the drug."

The hope is to personalize cancer treatment. Malfatti and his colleagues are teaming up with the University of California, Davis’s Comprehensive Cancer Center.

"So, it’s a very good collaborative study between technology that we have here at the Lab and then the clinical patients that UC Davis has."