Before a surgeon's first incision, a patient's blood already holds the story of what may come next. Researchers from KAIST and two major South Korean medical centers have found that colorectal cancer rewires the body's entire amino acid metabolism in ways that are readable in a single preoperative blood sample — not by measuring one marker in isolation, but by mapping how eighteen amino acids speak to one another. Published in Advanced Science in June 2026, the work suggests that prognosis, like most things worth understanding, is less about any single fact than about the relationships between