Calin lives in the Romanian city of Cluj. He suffers from melanoma and his mother died from colorectal cancer, aged 58. “It took two months just for a colonoscopy,” he recalls.

When Salvatore was diagnosed with brain cancer, he made headlines all over the world . International outlets like CNN and the BBC presented him as “the hacker who decrypted his medical records to create his open-source therapy”.

The spread of cancer cells to other parts of the body, known as metastasis , is the main cause of cancer-related deaths. According to the US National Cancer Institute, in 2018 there were 9.

Smoking is the largest single cause of preventable premature death and disease , accounting for some 650,000 premature deaths each year in the European Union, according to official EU statistics.

Medical experts pointed to non-infectious diseases—diabetes, cancer and heart disease— as a ticking time bomb at a recent meeting of health experts at the European Health Forum in Gastein, Austria.

Gold nanoparticles ( AuNPs ) present the many advantages of displaying relative biocompatibility, high light absorption and strong optical scattering properties. They are therefore good candidates to be used as probes for cancer imaging .

Researchers are trying to find out more about the relationship between different NPs’ shapes, sizes and surface chemistries and how they behave in the human body.