A new test might be able to detect blood clots and certain cancers.
Fox news reports on the new, simple paper urine test.
Scientists are likening the new, easy test to pregnancy tests; it is essentially a paper strip. The test is meant to detect blood clots and cancerous tumors.
“In a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), researchers detailed how they developed their cancer-detecting paper and showed its success in revealing certain tumors and blood clots. When the proteins and nanoparticles meet in the body, they produce small fragments of synthetic biomarkers, which can then be identified in the urine. In order to detect the blood clots, the nanoparticles were designed to seek out thrombosis instead of cancer proteins. The newly developed test paper strip is coated with antibodies that can detect these biomarker fragments,” according to Fox.
The procedure for performing the test is uncomplicated, anyone can easily have it and the time it takes to obtain results is also said to be less.
Fox explains, “All a patient needs to do is urinate on the strip, and the paper will display a line if cancer or thrombosis is present in the body. To verify their paper’s accuracy, the researchers used the test on a group of mice, showing that it accurately detected both colon cancers and blood clots in the rodents they used in the study.”
A few more trial runs will have to be conducted before the test can be marketed.
