I have come across this article entitled “Sensory Nanoparticles Could Enable Early

Disease Detection” from the Clinical OMICs website. Apparently, this article states that a
group of researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital have found a way to detect
diseases especially cancer through the use of nanoparticles. The blood biomolecules form
distinct corona profiles around the nanoparticles, making it easy to know what type of cancer
the patient has and will have in the future. I browsed from other references that presents the
same article and I found one that explained the process in a simpler way, like dipping a donut
hole in a powdered sugar, creating an analogy of the donut hole as the nanoparticle and the
powdered sugar as proteins. Morteza Mahmoudi, Ph. D., the current biomedical investigator
from the Department of Anesthesiology, and his team have further investigated it by
combining the concepts of disease-specific protein coronas and sensor array technology
where the latter can identify a wide scale of biological and chemical compounds all at once.
They tested blood samples for early detection of diseases by developing a sensor array that
have three different cross-reactive liposomes where liposomes are what causes the proteins to
form around them. The first experiment was done by testing samples of different types of
cancer from 5 patients which includes lung cancer, glioblastoma (brain cancer), meningioma
(tumor), myeloma (bone marrow), and pancreatic cancer. They have discovered that the
selected pattern of corona composition have a unique “fingerprint” for each type of cancer.
The formation of the coronas have been determined as personalized and precise. After that,
they repeated the experiment with 15 healthy people who subsequently have been diagnosed
with lung, pancreatic, and brain cancer up to 8 years. The latter experiment proved that they,
indeed, successfully detected the diseases at an early stage. However, the preliminary results
need further validation by testing it on a larger number of people to make sure its
effectiveness as well as its accuracy in providing diagnostic information. Mahmoudi and his
team also aims to not only detect cancer but also other diseases after the experiments become
fully validated.

Learning from this discovery, I thought of the saying “An ounce of prevention is
worth a pound of cure”. Creating a way of knowing a disease you can accumulate in the
future gave a one big step towards improving the longevity of the lives of our people
including mine. One person being saved from his deadline may have a big impact on the
majority. Great leaders, for instance, can continue to serve the people longer, making their
lives better because of the extension that they received because they knew what will befall to
them. Because of that extension, there came a positive outcome that will spread throughout
the people like a ripple effect. With this discovery, even I can grab the opportunity of living
longer in order for me to do all the things I need and want to do, to become who I want to be
in the future which is to be a licensed veterinarian. Cancer, one the scariest disease one can
have because it is so familiar that people equal it to early death. It didn’t help that up until
now, there is no discovered cure for it. However, because of the endless pursuit of
researchers, now we have advances just like the nanoparticles for early detection. We can
now prevent getting the disease at its peak. With that, we can at least spend less and live
more. What more if the research became applicable to other diseases as well? And what more
if the research can be open to animals as well?

Animals will be the center of my profession and knowing everything that may help
them is a must for people like me. A lot of people misconceive that cancer doesn’t occur to
animals especially to their domesticated pets like canines and felines. It is not known that 50
percent of pets over 10 years old will develop cancer. And even though they know, they just
wait for the symptoms to show before bringing them to professionals which is wrong because
the disease may already be complicated to treat and exceedingly expensive to pay. Through
the discovery, we can increase the animal’s survival rate by diagnosing and applying
treatment early. With that as a result, people who own animals are also affected, directly or
indirectly. If it did help lengthen the lives of these animals, the wildlife and other endangered
species can be preserved, live stocks will not undergo scarcity, and beloved pets can be with
their owners at least a little longer.
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https://www.clinicalomics.com/topics/precision-medicine-topic/sensory-nanoparticles-could-enable-
early-disease-detection/