Simona Francese

We can even say something about your state of mind if you take drugs or abuse.

And even, what have you been doing just prior to or during committing the crime?

So now you're still asking, OK, so when are we going to get to the part of breast cancer?

OK, we're going to get there.

We were looking at personal information.

So we were looking at the possibility to, from a fingerprint, say whether that belongs to a man or to a woman.

So for this study, we asked the donors to actually swipe a fingertip.

on a surface, okay?

So this is now a smudged fingerprint.

And then we used our moldy technique with fire laser.

We get the molecules blast off and then taken up by the mass spectrometer that measures the way.

And we were looking at proteins and we discovered that the protein profiles between men and women are different enough and we can tell them apart with the 86% of accuracy, right?

And this is, folks, where serendipity manifested in all of its beauty, right?

Because my next question was, who are these proteins?

And as I was looking into this, I realized that some of these proteins actually were already reported in the scientific literature as biomarkers of breast cancer.

Let that sink in.

Fingertip smears or smudged fingerprints contain proteins that might be able to tell whether a woman is affected by breast cancer or not.

So, of course, I rushed to my team, and, you know, we have a meeting, and our jaws really dropped.

I mean, mine was still dropping from the early discovery.

And we all had the same two images together in our mind.