In the ongoing fight against cancer and all its various forms and permutations, all doctors can agree that a timely diagnosis is critical to successfully slowing or halting the spread of the disease.

That’s a lot easier said than done: With many forms of the disease, the early signs and symptoms are subtle or non-existent, and in many cases by the time you feel strong pain or symptoms the cancer has already advanced. Anything that can speed up the discovery process could quite literally be a live-saver—especially when the cancer in question is something rare like myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS).

So let’s all give a round of applause to Dr. Frank Kuo and his colleagues at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and the Dana Farber Institute: Together, they developed the Rapid Heme Panel. The test allows doctors to quickly zero in on a more specific cancer diagnosis and treatment path.

One of the patients helped by the test is David Gill, an Army veteran from New Hampshire. Speaking to a Boston-area CBS affiliate, David recounts his shock at learning he had a serious and aggressive form of cancer—like many patients, he had no symptoms. The MDS quickly turned into acute leukemia, which can literally kill a patient within days. Thanks to the Rapid Heme Panel, doctors were able to offer David an experimental daily pill—if all goes well he’ll undergo chemotherapy and a stem cell transplant later this year.

David is just one of many patients whose outcome may have been changed by the Rapid Heme Panel in the past year and a half. A test like this is by no means a guarantee of success—cancer is nothing if not insidious and unpredictable. But anything that gives doctors and patients a leg up over cancer has to be considered a win.

Learn more about MDS from the MDS Foundation

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Watch the full video to learn more about the test—and to see David get a chance to thank Dr. Kuo in person. And be sure to check out what else Brigham and Women’s and Dana Farber are doing to fight cancer.