Share
Luo Yongzhang and his team in Tsinghua University's School of Life
Sciences in Beijing have successfully invented a reagent test kit of
Hsp90α for clinical use, which can diagnose multiple kinds of cancer
by analyzing a drop of human blood.
Luo and his team members in a lab. / CCTV Photo
Malignant tumors in early phases can be cured but once they
have spread all over the patient's body there is no way to save the
person's
life.
However, it's extremely difficult to be aware of cancer in its early
stages, as patients don't show obvious symptoms and thus it can
only be found in its later stages, which is already too late, so to
detect cancer early remains a global challenge for scientists.
Scientists around the globe are working to find ways to detect cancer in its early stage.
/ VCG Photo
Back in 1989, scientists have found a kind of heat shock proteins
(HSP), named Hsp90α, which existed in human bodies and can
be used as a cancer biomarker detection kit.
Scientists around the globe have been working on it since then,
and more than 10,000 journals have been published on accredited magazines, yet no one has actually turned their research results
into medical products.
However, Luo and his team seemed to have cracked the code, after
working on the problem since 2009. The team has produced an
artificial Hsp90α protein that gains structural stability by regrouping proteins. This means they are able to "create" the protein, in any
quantity, and at any time they wish to.
The kit has since been used in clinical trials involving 2,347 patients
at eight hospitals in China. It was the first clinical trial in the world
to test if the protein could be a useful tumor biomarker for lung
cancer, and it succeeded.
Now, the kit has been certified to enter the Chinese and European
markets, 24 years after Hsp90α was discovered.
The final product that has been approved by government and ready to enter
markets in China and Europe. / CCTV Photo
Cancer is a group of diseases involving abnormal cell growth with
the potential to invade or spread to other parts of the body.
In 2015, about 90.5 million people had cancer in the world, with
roughly 14.1 million new cases occurring each year. Approximately
8.8 million human deaths, or 15.7 percent of all deaths in the world,
are caused by cancer.
In China alone, 4.29 million people were detected as having cancer
in 2015, and 2.8 million of them died in that year.
