It goes without saying, but almost any cancer is treatable if detected early enough.
At present, scientists are working to discover the biomarkers — such as nucleic acids, proteins, sugars and lipids — that indicate the presence of tiny colonies of cancer cells in our bodies. It’s believed that these biomarkers show up years before a tumor grows.
Flushing cancer away.
Challenges remain, but scientists are already at work identifying biomarkers for various cancers (see a National Academies report from 2007). Sooner or later (and probably sooner) we’ll have a library of various biomarkers that correlate with cancer cell colonies.
With this in mind I was struck by a single line in a 20-minute talk given by theoretical physicist Michio Kaku at Thursday’s UP Experience in which he was envisioning the next 20 years when computer chips would become essentially free.
His simple line, “smart toilets,” was brilliant.
What he was saying is that it would be simple to include a lab-on-a-chip inside your household toilet that would analyze no. 1 and no. 2 each day to look for cancerous biomarkers.
This would be completely non-invasive and very likely, within a couple of decades, be able to identify most, if not all cancers before they can grow into dangerous tumors.
I can very easily see this happening and it will be awesome.