Krtin Nithiyanandam – a 16 years old Indian origin boy in the United Kingdom has claimed to have found a treatment for the most deadly form of breast cancer which is lethargic to drugs.
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Krtin Nithiyanandam hopes he has found a way to turn so-called triple negative breast cancer into a kind which responds to drugs.Triple negative breast cancer does not have receptors and it can only be treated with a combination of surgery, radiation and chemotherapy which lowers the chance of survival.
Many breast cancers are driven by oestrogen, progesterone or growth chemicals and so drugs that can block those fuels, such as tamoxifen, make effective treatments.
Krtin was quoted as saying “I’ve been basically trying to work out a way to change difficult-to-treat cancers into something that responds well to treatment. Most cancers have receptors on their surface which bind to drugs like Tamoxifen but triple negative don’t have receptors, so the drugs don’t work,”.
He has said“The prognosis for women with undifferentiated cancer isn’t very good, so the goal is to turn the cancer back to a state where it can be treated. The ID4 protein actually stops undifferentiated stem cell cancers from differentiating, so you have to block ID4 to allow the cancer to differentiate,”.
He added that he has found a way to silence the genes that produce ID4 which turns cancer back into a less dangerous state,”.
To Make chemotherapy more effective Krtin has also discovered that upping the activity of a tumor suppressor gene called PTEN allows chemotherapy to work more effectively, so the dual treatment could prove far more effective than traditional drugs.
The therapy idea saw him shortlisted for the final of the U.K.-based young scientists programme titled ‘The Big Bang Fair.’
His efforts had hit the headlines last year when he won the Google Science Fair for creating a test which helps pick up the early signs of Alzheimer’s disease and potentially stop it spreading further.
Watch Krtin : https://youtu.be/c67HkyQfr78