一滴血可“监测肿瘤” 已被批准临床使用
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.
来自清华大学生命科学学院的罗永章及其团队成功研发了一种临床用热休克蛋白90α试剂盒，它能通过分析一滴人体血液诊断多种癌症。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.
恶性肿瘤在早期阶段可以治愈，但一旦扩散到病人全身，就无药可医。
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，癌症在早期阶段十分难以察觉，因为患者没有明显的症状表现。因此，癌症的早期检测对全球科学家来说始终都是一个挑战。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，科学家们就已经发现了热休克蛋白90α。这种热休克蛋白存在于人体内，可用作肿瘤生物标志物检测试剂盒。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.
此后，世界各国的研究团队已经围绕这种蛋白，在权威杂志上发表了1万多篇论文，然而还没有人把研究成果转化为医疗产品。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.
罗永章及其团队自2009年开始研究这一问题，而他们似乎已经攻克难题。研究小组通过重组蛋白质制备出结构稳定的人工热休克蛋白90α。这意味着他们可以随时随意“生产”任意数量的热休克蛋白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.
该试剂盒此后被应用于临床试验，已对国内8家医院的2347例患者进行测试。这是世界上首个研究热休克蛋白90α能否作为肺癌的有效肿瘤生物标志物的临床试验，也是首个成功的试验。Now, the kit has been certified to enter the Chinese and European markets, 24 years after Hsp90α was discovered.
在发现热休克蛋白90α24年后，该试剂盒现已经获准进入中国和欧盟市场。Cancer is a group of diseases involving abnormal cell growth with the potential to invade or spread to other parts of the body.
癌症是异常细胞生长且可能侵入或扩散至身体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，全球约有9050万例癌症患者，每年大约有1410万例新生病例。约有880万人死于癌症，占全球死亡人数的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，仅在中国检测出的癌症患者就有429万人，而当年死亡的癌症患者为280万。
