In today’s world, cancer is one of the most dreaded diseases. However, experts say that if detected in its infancy, the patient stands a greater chance of fighting the disease and be completely out of danger. But the opportunities for early cancer screening is a privilege only very few people have, and more often than not, these are affluent folks who live near equipped medical centers or can get the means to travel to such centers.
What about those rural folks who live in remote areas and don’t have means to travel to these well-equipped medical centers? Chances of early cancer detection are slim given they often don’t go for any disease diagnosis if they are not sick, let alone the expensive cancer screening. When they do, the cancer (or any other disease for that matter) has already progressed to an advanced stage where their bodies are experiencing a little to a lot of discomforts.
At such a stage, though they still have a fighting chance, the chances would have been higher had they come a little earlier. Looking at cancer, in particular, it is not that the early cancer detection programs are not in place, but to most, it is expensive and only found in well-established medical centers far from their homes.
POC Medical Systems Inc. unveils affordable early cancer detection kit
Well, POC Medical Systems Inc. has unveiled the MammoAlert, a rapid, portable breast cancer screening test. In technical jargons, the MammoAlert kit is based on POC Medical Systems’ Pandora CDxTM microfluidics-based platform for rapid, point-of-care serum screening.
In layman’s language, the MammoAlert is a portable breast-cancer-screening-test kit that is very simple and easy to use. MammoAlert needs just a single drop of blood to run cancer detection tests in under 15 minutes, relying on multiple cancer markers for high accuracy. Experts privy to its design say it is more that 95% accurate with a false positive rate of zero.
No doubt the MammoAlert is going to have an enormous social impact especially in rural setups for thousands of women. Most of whom, could not afford to go for early breast cancer detection using the previously available medical technologies.
Advantages of the MammoAlert
The MammoAlert is soon being deployed in parts of India. Not only is the technology more accessible and affordable (costing about one-fourth of a typical mammogram test), it also removes the shame some women felt by having to expose their breasts for the tests to be conducted. This technology will not require the women to expose any parts of her body. Instead, a single blood drop from the tip of the finger will suffice, and the results will be out in less than 15 minutes.
This pre-screening test also does not expose the women and the medics to radiations as is the case with earlier breast cancer detection tests. Public use of the technology will commence in India starting June this year, while the United States Food and Drug Administration is expected to give its possible approval within the next nine months.
