The 16-year-old Indian-origin researcher, Krtin Nithiyanandam, has claimed that he has instituted a way to turn so-called triple negative breast cancer into a kind which responds to drugs.
The triple negative breast cancer is considered to be the most deadly form of breast cancer which is unresponsive to drugs. The UK NRI teenager claims that he has been trying to work out a way to change difficult-to-treat cancers into something that responds well to treatment. Krtin has so far been working on the therapies in his school lab and at home but he is hoping to gain interest from the scientific community to develop the work further. “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…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….I have found a way to silence the genes that produce ID4 which turns cancer back into a less dangerous state”, Krtin was quoted as claiming the invention.
Importantly, the 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. Krtin Nithiyanandam is hoping to gain interest from the scientific community to develop the work further.
The teenager moved to the United Kingdom from India with his parents. He was shortlisted for his therapy idea in the final of the UK-based young scientists programme ‘The Big Bang Fair’. In 2015, UK-NRI teenager also won the Google Science Fair for creating an Alzheimer’s test which can spot the disease 10 years before diagnoses.