Soon, a single drop of blood can help detect cancer! - Read
New Delhi: In a discovery that has the potential to become a medical breakthrough, a team of scientists in China has found a simple solution to detect various forms of cancer - everything you need for diagnosis is a drop of blood.
Researchers at the School of Life Sciences at Tsinghua University have developed the reagent kit (mixture) of the Hsp90a protein for clinical use.
Previously, scientists had identified a kind of heat shock protein (HSP), named Hsp90a, which exists in human bodies and can be used as a cancer biomarker. Researcher Luo Yongzhang and his team produced an artificial Hsp90a protein that gains structural stability by pooling proteins.
This means that they are able to "create" the protein, in any quantity and at any time they wish, said CGTN public television. The test kit was used in clinical trials involving 2,347 patients in eight hospitals in China.
This was the first clinical trial in the world to test whether the protein could be a useful tumor biomarker for lung cancer, and it was successful, according to the report.
The kit has now been certified to enter the Chinese and European markets, 24 years after the discovery of Hsp90a protein.
Cancer is a group of diseases involving abnormal cell growth with the potential to invade or spread to other parts of the body.
By 2015, about 90.5 million people have had cancer worldwide, with about 14.1 million new cases occurring each year. About 8.8 million human deaths, or 15.7% of all deaths worldwide, are caused by cancer. In China alone, 4.29 million people were diagnosed with cancer in 2015, and 2.8 million died this year.
(With PTI entries)
HEALTH COACH -
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