Scientists discover a new way that could identify the disease even at Stage I, the earliest stage
Colon cancer is one of the most common types of cancer – both in India and worldwide. Presently, colon cancer gets detected at very late stages. A new collaborative study involving four institutes in India and one in France and led by Dr. Sagar Sengupta at the National Institute of Immunology (NII), has discovered a new way that could identify the disease even at Stage I, the earliest stage. Dr. Sengupta’s laboratory works on micro RNAs, which are small single-stranded non-coding RNA molecules, silence the expression of many proteins. The micro RNAs are known to bind to the messenger RNA molecules that code for the proteins and thereby either inactivate or destroy them.
