一滴血可“監測腫瘤” 已被批准臨牀使用
Scientists around the world are striving for effective detection of cancer in the early stages, and a Chinese scientist may have found a quick way of knowing whether malignant tumors exist in a patient's body, with just one drop of blood.
Luo Yongzhang and his team in Tsinghua University's School of Life Sciences in Beijing have successfully invented a reagent test kit of Hsp90α for clinical use, which can diagnose multiple kinds of cancer by analyzing a drop of human blood.
來自清華大學生命科學學院的羅永章及其團隊成功研發了一種臨牀用熱休克蛋白90α試劑盒，它能通過分析一滴人體血液診斷多種癌症。Malignant tumors in early phases can be cured but once they have spread all over the patient's body there is no way to save the person's life.
惡性腫瘤在早期階段可以治癒，但一旦擴散到病人全身，就無藥可醫。
However, it's extremely difficult to be aware of cancer in its early stages, as patients don't show obvious symptoms, so to detect cancer early remains a global challenge for scientists.
然而，癌症在早期階段十分難以察覺，因爲患者沒有明顯的症狀表現。因此，癌症的早期檢測對全球科學家來說始終都是一個挑戰。Back in 1989, scientists have found a kind of heat shock proteins (HSP), named Hsp90α, which existed in human bodies and can be used as a cancer biomarker detection kit.
早在1989年，科學家們就已經發現了熱休克蛋白90α。這種熱休克蛋白存在於人體內，可用作腫瘤生物標誌物檢測試劑盒。Scientists around the globe have been working on it since then, and more than 10,000 journals have been published on accredited magazines, yet no one has actually turned their research results into medical products.
此後，世界各國的研究團隊已經圍繞這種蛋白，在權威雜誌上發表了1萬多篇論文，然而還沒有人把研究成果轉化爲醫療產品。However, Luo and his team seemed to have cracked the code, after working on the problem since 2009. The team has produced an artificial Hsp90α protein that gains structural stability by regrouping proteins. This means they are able to "create" the protein, in any quantity, and at any time they wish to.
羅永章及其團隊自2009年開始研究這一問題，而他們似乎已經攻克難題。研究小組通過重組蛋白質製備出結構穩定的人工熱休克蛋白90α。這意味着他們可以隨時隨意“生產”任意數量的熱休克蛋白90α。The kit has since been used in clinical trials involving 2,347 patients at eight hospitals in China. It was the first clinical trial in the world to test if the protein could be a useful tumor biomarker for lung cancer, and it succeeded.
該試劑盒此後被應用於臨牀試驗，已對國內8家醫院的2347例患者進行測試。這是世界上首個研究熱休克蛋白90α能否作爲肺癌的有效腫瘤生物標誌物的臨牀試驗，也是首個成功的試驗。Now, the kit has been certified to enter the Chinese and European markets, 24 years after Hsp90α was discovered.
在發現熱休克蛋白90α24年後，該試劑盒現已經獲准進入中國和歐盟市場。Cancer is a group of diseases involving abnormal cell growth with the potential to invade or spread to other parts of the body.
癌症是異常細胞生長且可能侵入或擴散至身體其他部位的一系列疾病。In 2015, about 90.5 million people had cancer in the world, with roughly 14.1 million new cases occurring each year. Approximately 8.8 million human deaths, or 15.7 percent of all deaths in the world, are caused by cancer.
2015年，全球約有9050萬例癌症患者，每年大約有1410萬例新生病例。約有880萬人死於癌症，佔全球死亡人數的15.7%。In China alone, 4.29 million people were detected as having cancer in 2015, and 2.8 million of them died in that year.
2015年，僅在中國檢測出的癌症患者就有429萬人，而當年死亡的癌症患者爲280萬。
