Professor Marc Porter and his research team made front page news for their development of a new liver cancer test. The test is fast, portable, inexpensive to produce, and has the potential to be customized in order to screen for many other diseases. The patient supplies blood, saliva, urine, or a teardrop, which is placed on absorbent paper infused with a chemical serum made of gold nanoparticles that visibly react with proteins specific to liver cancer, producing a red dot, which indicates that the patient has the disease. Results can be read in about two minutes, which is substantially faster than standard liver testing, and the tests have a much wider reach as they can be administrated anywhere and are much cheaper than lab-based blood tests or ultrasounds. Members of the research team will be traveling to Mongolia, one of the highest concentrations of liver cancer in the world, to train medical professionals on how to use the test.

For further reading, the original articles can be found in The Salt Lake Tribune and Deseret News.