Moneyball Medicine

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. But what this liquid doesn’t have are a lot of the extra components like antibodies that would get in the way if you were looking for specific biomarkers—such as the low-molecular-weight proteins 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. "Namida" is actually the Japanese word for tears, and beyond breast cancer, 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