A 16-year-old teenager might finally have a cure for breast cancer. Krtin Nithiyanandam, an Indian high school student based in the United Kingdom, claims that he has found a way to make the cancer more responsive to treatments, particularly the form known to medical experts as the triple negative breast cancer (TNBC).
Unlike other types of cancer, a triple negative breast cancer does not have any receptors. Hence, it is harder for the cells to bind to the medication, making most breast cancer treatments unsuccessful.
But Krtin Nithiyanandam said that he has discovered a way to make this more receptive. He cites the process as "differentiating," which involves aiding a protein in the cell, called ID4, to prevent the cancer from progressing. "You have to block ID4 to allow the cancer to differentiate," he told Telegraph. "I have found a way to silence the genes that produce ID4 which turns cancer back into a less dangerous state."
Krtin Nithiyanandam, age 16, may have found a way to make triple negative #breastcancer react to medicine. https://t.co/uZyjxKouEV
— The Pink Agenda (@ThePinkAgenda) August 30, 2016
The teenager made his discovery while working at the school laboratory. His work is part of The Big Bang Fair competition, which will culminate in November, per the official site. But he hopes his ideas will be acknowledged and looked into by experts, who have the resources to do further studies and compound on what the teenager has found out.
Krtin Nithiyanandam already has ideas on how the next steps of research must go. "[I'm] trying to develop a system which would allow me to successfully introduce PTEN and the ID4 inhibitors in vivo," he said in the report.
Of women suffering from breast cancer, it is believed that 10 to 20 percent have triple negative breast cancer, per Breast Cancer Org. Hormonal therapy, such as Tamoxifen or Herceptin, don't always work with TNBC, but there have been patients who have had survived for longer term via chemotherapy.
