The Harry Glorikian Show Podcast - Cry Me a Biomarker: Using Tears To Screen for Cancer

Podcast Link: https://glorikian.com/screen-for-cancer/

Listen to our CEO Omid Moghadam and our CSO Dr. Anna Daily, PhD discuss screening for cancer with tears with Harry Glorikian.

Tears are a signal of more than just our emotions. The liquid in tears comes from blood plasma, and contains a lot of the same proteins and other biomolecules that circulate in the bloodstream—including those released as a byproduct of the inflammation around tumors. Harry's guests Anna Daily and Omid Moghadam are from a startup called Namida Lab that’s the first company to market a lab test using tears to predict cancer risk. Specifically, Namida’s test assesses the short-term risk that a patient might have breast cancer, as a way of helping them decide how soon to go in for a mammogram. And beyond #breastcancer, the company aims to build a whole business around risk assessment and #diagnostics , using just the #biomarkers in tears. Eventually it could be possible to collect a sample of your tears on a small strip of absorbent paper, send it in to Namida Lab, and find out whether you have #coloncancer, #pancreaticcancer, #prostatecancer, or #ovariancancer. Namida’s big vision, as Moghadam and Daily tell it, is to use tear testing to make #precisionmedicine and diagnostics more accessible and affordable, including to patients who might live far away from tertiary care centers.