When it comes to battling cancer, early detection is paramount. A recent New Atlas article noted a new urine test that can detect bladder cancer up to 10 years before clinical signs appear. A long-term study from the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) monitored urine samples from 50,000 healthy Iranian subjects for a period of 10 years. The researchers were looking for mutations in the telomerase reverse transcriptase (TERT) gene, which are common in many cases of bladder cancer.
In the so-called Golestan Cohort study, 38 of the subjects developed bladder cancer, and 46.7% of them had TERT mutations. More importantly, no TERT mutations were found in a control group of 152 matched cancer-free subjects. Although it’s an early pilot study, the results were promising and could lead to a simple, inexpensive way to detect bladder cancer early and save lives.
![“Another key [UDI] benefit, because we're calling that product by the same name across the healthcare supply chain… rich and robust data that we can access around supply consumption and utilization rates. One of the buzz terms we've heard during the COVID-19 crisis was what's my burn rate? How fast am I going through gowns, masks, gloves?” – Mike Schiller, Senior Director at AHRMM](https://img.healthcarepackaging.com/files/base/pmmi/all/image/2020/08/UDI.5f4d326e41d53.png?auto=format&fit=crop&h=146&w=340)
