A 16-year-old Indian-origin boy from UK's Surrey has claimed to have found a treatment for the most deadly form of breast cancer. Krtin Nithiyanandam believes he has devised a way to turn the triple negative breast cancer into a kind which responds to drugs. Around 7,500 women each year are diagnosed with triple negative breast cancer, a type of disease which does not respond to today's most effective drugs. Many breast cancers are driven by oestrogen, progesterone or growth chemicals, so drugs that can block those fuels, such as tamoxifen, make effective treatments. "Most cancers have receptors on their surface which bind to drugs, but triple negative don't have receptors so the drugs don't work," Krtin said. Thus, it can be only treated with a combination of surgery, radiation and chemotherapy which lowers chances of survival.

Researchers have found that some women with triple negative cancer respond very well to treatment while others quickly decline. The problem lies in whether the cancer cells are "differentiated" or not. Differentiated means they look more like healthy cells and tend to grow and multiply quite slowly, and are less aggressive.

However, when cancer cells are "undifferentiated" they get stuck in a dangerous primitive form, never turning into recognisable breast tissue, and spreading quickly, leading to high-grade tumours.

The teenager, who last year won the Google Science Fair for creating an Alzheimer's test which can spot the disease 10 years before diagnosis, said, "The goal is to turn the cancer back to a state where it can be treated. The ID4 protein stops undifferentiated stem cell cancers from differentiating, so you have to block ID4 to allow the cancer to differentiate."