Fermiscan's Technology first published - in Nature in 1999

The breakthrough technology that underpins Fermiscan's objectives in bringing revolutionary diagnostics to the market, is the discovery by an Australian scientist that breast cancer can be detected by X-ray diffraction of hair.

This work was first published in the prestigious scientific journal Nature in 1999 (vol. 398: 33-34), in a paper entitled "Using hair to screen for breast cancer." Click here to access the full paper

"We have studied hair using fibre X-ray diffraction studies with synchrotron radiation and find that hair from breast-cancer patients has a different intermolecular structure to hair from healthy subjects. These changes are seen in all samples of scalp and pubic hair taken from women diagnosed with breast cancer. All the hair samples from women who tested positive for a mutation of the BRCA1 gene, which is associated with a higher risk of breast cancer [10] also show these changes. Because our results are so consistent, we propose that such hair analyses may be used as a simple, non-invasive screening method for breast cancer."

Figure 1. X-ray scattering patterns. Left, hair from
a healthy 21-year-old female; right, hair from a
48-year-old breast-cancer patient. Horizontal and
vertical arrows, parts of the pattern that are
unchanged and arise from ordering and packing
in the hair fibril. Diagonal arrow, a region of
intensity arising from the membrane bonding
the fibrils together. In the changed pattern,
a diffuse ring resulting from random orientation
superimposes on this region. Nature 1999: 398: 33-34

To view references click here