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Cancer diagnosis as simple as a pregnancy test

posted by LaminatorX on Wednesday February 26 2014, @09:31PM   Printer-friendly
from the Negative-never-felt-so-good dept.

AnonTechie writes:

"A paper strip can sample urine for signs of tumors in the body. The cancer-detecting strip could one day make it simpler and more affordable to detect some cancers at an early stage. Unlike communicable infections like HIV and tuberculosis, signals from tumor proteins are difficult to detect. To get around that problem, the researchers created nano-scale biomarkers that can be injected into the bloodstream. Each marker is designed to interact with specific proteins that are produced by cancer cells. When the two meet, the proteins snip off tiny fragments of the marker. Those fragments eventually find their way into the urine. The test works like a pregnancy test; a person urinates on a paper strip coated with antibodies that can detect the marker fragments. If the fragments are present, the paper displays a line indicating the presence of cancer tissue in the body. Altogether, the process takes about an hour."

[ED Note: Link is to an abstract. PDF with more detailed info here.]

 
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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by qwade on Wednesday February 26 2014, @09:51PM

    by qwade (1006) on Wednesday February 26 2014, @09:51PM (#7579)

    Reminds me about a story [go.com] I read a few weeks back. Guy jokingly takes a pregnancy test, posts the positive result and gets a comment that the hormone it looks for also could indicate testicular cancer. Looks like it could be a more advanced and reliable form of this kind of test.

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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by dyingtolive on Wednesday February 26 2014, @10:15PM

    by dyingtolive (952) on Wednesday February 26 2014, @10:15PM (#7586)

    Yeah, I knew that I had heard something similar to this before somewhere. Pretty great, if we can expand the types of cancer detected.

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