Question: how likly is it that you will find a cure for catching cancer early?

Sarah Thomas answered on 12 Mar 2011:

I think the theory behind my idea for the blood test is good. But sometimes in science the theory doesn’t always work when you put it into practice!

When I answered your “will your research help us in any way?” question, I talked about the tag and the dye complex. The thing I need to do next is link the tag and the dye together. I’m trying out different ways of doing that just now. Once I have done that, I need to try different dyes and find the one that gives the best fluorescence! The more powerfully it glows, the easier it will be for the doctor to say whether it is a positive or negative result.

Then I will need to do some tests with different cancer chemicals and record the concentrations I need in the blood sample to get a positive result. This is really important! The lower the concentration the better, as people that have cancer in the early stages have low concentrations of these chemicals in their blood and people in the late stages have very high concentrations. These tests I can do in test tubes in the lab, I won’t need real blood samples to do it. This kind of testing is called “in vitro”.

Realistically, I only have another 1.5 years left to do my research and I think all this work will take me that long. So what will happen then is my boss will advertise for someone to do a PhD that will pick up from where I left off.

The next stage will be “in vivo” testing. This will involve using real blood samples from a wide mixture of people: people with different types of cancer, different stages and people that don’t have cancer. That is a lot of work! We’d also want to test to make sure that other drugs do not interfere with the test because sometimes people are on medication for different conditions.

So I guess the short answer is yes, I think this will work but it’s going to take another 5 years or so of research until it can be tested on real patients. 🙁