Medical Breakthrough: A pill to detect cancer
Soon there will be no need for painful biopsies to detect cancer, just pop a pill to find out.
Thinking that you might have cancer is already a heartbreak. As if that isn’t painful enough, patients must go through complex biopsies to check if they really have the disease.
But with this pill that Stanford University researchers are expecting to launch, this painful process will be a thing of the past. The research, spearheaded by Professors John Ronald and Sanjiv Gambhir, was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
So how does it work? According to the study, the drug in question contains pieces of DNA which can trigger cancerous cells to secrete a type of protein called secreted embryonic alkaline phosphatase into the bloodstream. A simple finger-prick blood test is enough to detect these molecules and determine if a patient has cancer. Essentially, it’s as easy as popping a pill and going through a blood test.
“We want to translate this strategy into humans, so we’ve set it up in a way that’s most likely to be effective, safe and convenient,” said Gambhir in a statement. “We haven’t got it down to a pill yet, but the oral delivery part of this is likely a solvable problem — only a few years off, not five or 10 years off.”
Let’s hope the revolutionary pill sees the light of day as soon as expected!
Natasha Gan
