Scientists Have Found A Potential Method To Detect Cancer

Science has made several breakthroughs in both treating and dialogizing cancers in the last few years. However, there remains an unanswered question that troubled cancer survivors and scientists alike: what if it comes back?

The good news here is, an AIBN’s team (short for the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology) has found out a way to distinguish healthy cells and cancer cells, using an epigenetic approach.

What used to stand in the way of scientists to find a precise method to detect cancer was the fact that this disease is extremely complicated and changeable. Resolving this issue is the key to tell cancer cells apart.

This is precisely what the AIBN’s team has found.

The researchers’ main subject was circulating free DNA, which is degraded fragments of DNA that can be found in blood plasma. To be more specific, they studied a type of methyl-enhanced DNA called methylcytosines because they believed it gave cancer cells distinct chemical and physical characteristics.

It turned out that the DNA changes are similar in every type of cancer known to science, paving the way to make a single biomarker. That epigenetic reprogramming is what researchers can look at and conclude which ones are cancer cells.

If this finding turns out to be a viable solution, detecting cancer may take no more than 10 minutes and require only DNA input and a small amount of sample. It does not need the kind of equipment that can only find in labs like a DNA sequencing either.

However, the team is still cautious because whether this finding can lead to a universal cancer detecting method or not is a challenging question.

There are still a lot of information gaps about cancer that we have not yet been able to fill. This study has taken us a step closer to fully understand cancer.