Wow, wow, wow. New South Wales Woman of the Year, 29 year old Dharmica Mistry, might just have made a breakthrough to help combat one of the biggest killers of women, breast cancer.
Dharmica’s work as a cancer researcher has led her to discover that there’s an association between breast cancer and changes in a person’s hair, or hair follicles! Initially just looking at the association between hair and breast cancer, Dharmica and her team’s research led them to realise there hadn’t been much focus on lipids – fat molecules that make up your cells and their connection to cancer. From there, she and her team have identified a specific technology that can identify these lipids in the blood in order to successfully determine if someone has breast cancer or not. Their success rate in the first trial with 100 people was 90%!
Imagine if all you had to do was have a blood test to see if you have breast cancer! Not only will it make breast cancer testing more accessible, it will enable patients who’ve had the disease already to be continually monitored (and unable to have a mammogram) and any women who are genetically predispositioned to have the disease to be regularly checked as part of their normal doctor check ups.
Whilst the research is in it’s final stages of validation – they are running one more study to confirm the numbers and results the first testing did, which will then lead to clinical trials – Dharmica and her team are hoping the breast cancer blood testing will be available to the general population in the not too distant future!
We are so lucky here in Australia to have such wonderful researchers, not to mention surgeons and the medical industry in general. We are definitely keeping up with and often leading the world when it comes to scientific discoveries and innovations and this particular development is definitely one to keep an eye on! It certainly would be revolutionary in the way we approached breast cancer screening and could definitely pave the way for further research into breast cancer. We want to give a big shout out to Dharmica Mistry – a woman making other women proud!
If you would like further information on this amazing topic you can read more here.