(Image Library / Science / Biopsy.) When removing a piece of suspected tissue for badysis, you can block it. It is benign (abnormal growth of cells without risk to health) or malignant – in this case a cancer.
Symptoms, but cancers often leave traces in the blood of patients. act of small pieces of mutant DNA or specific proteins, which divide the space between red and white blood cells. Taking advantage of this behavior, researchers from from the University of Queensland, Australia, have come up with a much faster and less invasive way of detecting the disease.All is happening from the present DNA samples in the blood, and the best: the benefit of the diagnosis of up to 10 m Inutes.
As you know, DNA is the cake recipe. which determines each characteristic of our body. Each cell has a copy of this manual at the base – but usually does not follow tim-tim by tim-tim. Indeed, cells located on the nail, for example, do not need to have the same characteristics as liver cells. To differentiate themselves from each other, they have structures that "read" the recipe and focus on producing only the important parts.
E healthy cells, those who perform this work are the methyl groups. to three atoms of hydrogen). Such molecules prevent the transcription of DNA, a process related to the formation of new proteins. It is up to the different proteins to control gene expression. Thus, genes useful for the functions of a given cell are linked. However, in cancer cells, this pattern is subverted. Instead of leaving them scattered in the cell, the disease concentrates the methyl groups only in certain places. Without this rigid control, genes linked to tumor reproduction have the perfect flaw to function at full speed: the tumor cells reproduce and the cancer worsens over time. by Australian researchers, the suspect DNA is placed in the water with a series of nanoparticles of gold. Because of the golden metal, the water turns pink. If the added DNA comes from cancer cells, the gold particles stick to the genetic material, making the water again transparent. "If you can detect change at the naked eye, it's as simple as it sounds," said Matt Trau, who led the study, in a statement ]. Tests with 200 blood samples and of bad, prostate, intestinal or lymphoma tissues identified tumor cells with 90% efficiency. That is to say that all 100 tumors submitted to improvised pool with gold salts, 90 appeared in less than 10 minutes.
According to what the researchers wrote in a study published in the journal Nature Nature Communications the affinity for gold seems to apply also to other types of tumors. The idea of the group is to make the diagnosis as general as possible and to complement the detection of malignant cells in humans.
In addition to not having been tested on real patients, but only on samples of blood and cancerous tissue, there is another challenge: the technique only accuses the presence of cancer, not his type. Today we know more than a hundred varieties of the disease.
The blood test technology of a person behind traces of malignancy is not new and has even been successfully tested recently. In early 2018, scientists from Johns Hopkins University in the United States also found the results of facilitators using a similar approach, CancerSEEK. The test examined blood samples from more than 1,000 cancer patients and achieved 98% efficiency in the diagnosis of certain types of the disease, such as ovarian cancer.