Lara Adejoro
A 24-year-old student from Spain, Judit Giró Benet, has developed a home-testing kit for breast cancer.
Benet came up with the idea following her mother’s diagnosis of breast cancer. She had realised the need for a more accessible test for the disease, reports say.
Her invention — The Blue Box — fetched her the top prize for the 2020 James Dyson Award.
However, a former President of the Nigerian Cancer Society, Prof. Sani Malami, said though a very commendable effort, the device is still a long way from being recommended as a screening or diagnostic tool for cancer of the breast, because it has not been clinically validated in a clinical trial.
According to TechNewsWorld, Benet’s experience with a dog at the University of Spain at Barcelona where she first started studying biology sparked her interest to find the biological code for detecting cancer.
The dog could smell a patient’s breath and detect if the patient had lung cancer.
“That piqued my interest in studying how the dog’s biology could do this,” Benet told the online medium.
That experience led her to a programme of biomedical study at the University of California at Irvine. There, she met a professor and worked with a colleague who became her mentor on The Blue Box research and development.
“I believe this device is something that the world needed. I refused to stop until the world told me otherwise,” she said.
The Blue Box is a biomedical device for pain-free, non-irradiating, non-invasive, low-cost ($60), and in-home breast cancer testing. The device itself works within 30 seconds, and results are achieved through a simple urine sample.
“The name comes from the notion of having the world see it as a box that is blue and nothing else to eliminate fear and worry about cancer,” she explained.
The Blue Box uses six chemical sensors and reacts to targeted breast cancer biomarkers. The process uses a urine sample and an AI algorithm to detect early signs of breast cancer.
Once the algorithm has reached a diagnosis, the results are sent back to the user’s phone and displayed in The Blue Box app. The app pairs with The Blue Box and serves as a transmission system to the cloud-based analysis.
The iPhone and Android apps notify the user about the diagnosis results. The process takes just a few minutes. The app (pictured above) supports both iPhone and Android platforms.
In a post on James Dyson Awards website on the device, Benet said that, as opposed to the current painful and inconvenient routinary procedure that oftentimes leads to anxiety, The Blue Box enables women to get self-tested at home.
“During my undergrad years, I came across a study by the CDC reporting almost 40 percent of women skipping the mammogram breast cancer screening (41 percent due to pain), potentially resulting in 1/3 cancers detected too late, and thus worse survival chance for women.
“This frustration motivated me to discover that 93.55 percent of breast cancers diagnosed by a mammogram are “false alarms” (Catalan Department of Health).
“Finally, although a single radiation dose is not harmful, yearly exposure to a mammogram increases breast cancer risk itself. Consequently, there exists a need for a pain-free, accurate, non-irradiating, low-cost, in-home breast cancer test.”
Though the device will need rigorous trials and approvals, experts say The Blue Box home testing kit would meet a very important need for breast cancer diagnosis.
Speaking with PUNCH HealthWise, a former President of the Nigerian Cancer Society, Prof. Sani Malami, said “breast cancer is one of the most important public health challenges of our time. It leads to thousands of untimely deaths in Nigeria each year.
“The Blue Box home testing kit would, therefore, be filling a very important void.
“However, despite its impressive technology which is allegedly able to detect breast cancer, it has still not been clinically validated in a clinical trial. Until that is done, its reliability and accuracy will be considered uncertain.
“In other words, it is still a long way from being recommended as a screening or diagnostic tool for cancer of the breast.”
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