Matt Trau, a professor of chemistry at the University of Queensland, stunned the science world back in December [2018] when the prestigious journal Nature Communications published his lab’s discovery about a unique property of cancer DNA that could lead to a simple, cheap, and accurate test to detect any type of cancer in under 10 minutes.
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Here is his story in his own words.
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Ours was a completely serendipitous discovery. What we found in the lab was this one marker that just kept coming up in all of the types of breast cancers we were studying. No one believed it. I didn’t believe it. I thought, “Gosh, okay, maybe it’s a fluke.”
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DNA from cancer folds in water into three-dimensional structures that are very different from healthy cells’ DNA. It’s quite literally the needle in a haystack.
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Once we figured out what was going on, we could easily set up a system to detect the trace cancerous DNA. It binds to gold nanoparticles in water and changes color. The test takes 10 minutes, and you can detect it by eye. Red indicates cancer and blue doesn’t.
Read full, original post: A Cancer Researcher Opens Up About His Astonishing Breakthrough
