Drugstore Cancer Tests

This will fit well with the last article I posted about my friend's blog article lauding the National Cancer Institute's foray into Nanotechnology for cures for cancer. In the following excerpted article , from MIT's nationally recognized magazine Technology Review, we learn about new nanotech powered devices that could empower everyone to test early for cancer. It would mean testing early enough to prevent health degradation. They would be cheap and readily available from your local drugstore. That is the goal.

Drugstore Cancer Tests

A new nano-device could eventually find its way to a pharmacy aisle near you.

By Kevin Bullis

October 31, 2005

Biomedical researchers have been discovering more and more proteins that reveal the presence of a cancer before its symptoms appear -- and while its treatment success rate is still high. Yet turning these findings into quick, accurate, and inexpensive diagnostic tests has proven difficult.

Recent advances in nanotech devices, however, point to new ways for developing inexpensive and effective cancer-screening devices.

One of the most promising of these new detectors is being built by Charles Lieber, a chemist at Harvard University. In an article this month in Nature Biotechnology, he announced a highly-sensitive detector that can simultaneously find multiple cancer markers.

According to Lieber, the device, which uses nanowires to detect telltale cancer proteins, could lead to inexpensive and highly-accurate tests -- people could even buy them in a local drugstore and perform the testing themselves. "We can take a very small amount of blood and with a very simple filtration step get an answer within five minutes," Lieber says, adding that the device has "a sensitivity a thousand times better" than in a lab.

Well that is only a taste so be sure to follow this link to see the rest.

Won't it be great to be able to head off cancer well before it can even effect your health? Think of how many lives that will save! It will mean more people surviving long enough to reach escape velocity as put forth in the SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) approach to curing aging by Aubrey de Grey and so be able to take full advantage of the soon coming cures for aging and more.