A Shanghai hospital is collaborating with a biotechnology company from the United Kingdom to start clinical trials of a method to screen for cancer through breathing tests - which it said has great potential to become an easy, noninvasive and less expensive way for early diagnosis of various cancers.It was the first time that such a technology had come to the Chinese mainland, said Renji Hospital affiliated with Shanghai Jiao Tong University, the Chinese partner in the Sino-UK project, during a signing ceremony with Cambridge-based Owlstone Medical on Monday in Shanghai.The British company will provide its patented devices and training, and the Shanghai hospital will provide lab space and a research team.Subjects of the test need only wear a breathalyzer and breathe for several minutes as the device checks for volatile organic compounds, or VOCs. The test samples the whole body, doctors said.VOCs are produced as the end product of metabolic processes within the human body. Underlying changes in metabolic activity can produce VOC patterns characteristic of specific diseases, they said.Owlstone said on its website that the device uses a chemical sensor on a tiny silicon chip.Wang Liwei, director of the lab, said the China-UK team is working on a detailed proposal for the trial, which includes setting standards for the telltale VOCs and the age range of the subjects. The trials are expected to begin in three months."Such trials have been carried out in the UK on 4,000 individuals and achieved an accuracy rate that qualified for clinical application. So it may win approval for use in the UK soon," Wang said.He said the hospital will first carry out trials looking for lung cancer, the most common form of cancer and the leading cause of cancer deaths in China. The target for the trials is 70 percent accuracy.With a total of 787,000 newly diagnosed patients every year, lung cancer tops China's malignant tumor incidence and accounts for nearly one-fourth of cancer deaths in the country, according to the National Cancer Center."Such a fast and noninvasive means of screening will reduce the cost of medical treatment for individuals and society as a whole and improve the overall early diagnosis and survival rate of cancer patients," Wang said.Chris Hodkinson, vice-president of business development at Owlstone Medical, said the cooperation will improve the technology and eventually benefit more cancer patients at home and abroad.Experts said VOCs originating from all parts of the body are captured in a person's breath, making the technology applicable to a wide range of cancers."We have plans to expand the screening technology to other cancers, including gastric cancer and intestinal cancer, for which the current detection means - gastroscopy and enteroscopy - are kind of painful, and to pancreatic cancer, which is hard to discover," Wang said. custom id braceletsmake custom bracelets onlinebracelet montre siliconeevent wristbands vancouvercolor filled wristband
[Photo/VCG] The parasites that cause malaria may be helpful in treating patients with terminal cancers, Chinese researchers speculate, although more work is needed before the idea can be adopted for clinical use. In their study, malaria parasites were injected into the bodies of patients in a precisely controlled manner designed to minimize risks. The parasites stimulated the immune system, which in turn fought off cancerous cells, according to the Guangzhou Institute of Biomedicine and Health. Zhong Nanshan, a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and a leading member of the research team, said nearly 30 patients have been involved in trials over the past four years. Of the 10 cases that were under observation in the past year, five have shown progress against cancers. All the patients are at terminal stages of cancers such as lung and rectal cancer. All had tried other means of treatment before the trial but nothing was effective, he said. In this file photo taken on May 1, 2018, a worker shows some of the mosquitoes they breed at the Entomologist Research Center in Obuasi, Ashanti Region, in Ghana. [Photo/VCG] Chen Xiaoping, a researcher at the institute in Guangzhou, said that of the five whose conditions improved with the therapy, two may have been cured. In one case, a patient with lung cancer, all the tumors on his neck vanished after a month of receiving injections of one milliliter of blood with malaria parasites, he said. The anti-malaria drug artemisinin was given to the patient at the same time to minimize side effects, he said. Later, surgeons removed the original tumor in the patient's lung and found the tumor had been wrapped by a membrane, and most of the cancer cells had disappeared and been replaced by immune cells, as was shown in previous experiments with mice, he said. The patient has lived for about two years after receiving the therapy and no recurrence of the cancer has appeared, he said. Chen said before the study, researchers at the institute had done more than 10 years of research, which revealed that infection with malaria can greatly extend the life of mice with cancer. Zhong said that although the new treatment shows positive signs, it has been applied to only a few individual cases, and there's not enough evidence to prove the therapy is broadly effective. More research is needed before any firm conclusions can be drawn, Zhong said. Zhou Shuisen, a malaria researcher at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said the use of malaria parasites as a cancer treatment is limited to research and exploration, and more study is needed before moving to clinical application. It is still too early to reach the conclusion that malaria parasites can cure cancer, he said.
