HYDERABAD, Feb 28: Research scholar Ghulam Murtaza Arain has claimed to have developed a new method for treating various types of cancer and providing immediate relief to patients.

Mr Arain was presenting his work at a seminar on "Spectrophotometric and liquid chromatographic determination of metal ions and metalloids by derivatization" at the Sindh University campus on Tuesday. He said that anticancer drugs cisplatin and carboplatin altered the natural time course of testicular, ovarian, bladder, lung, gastric, head and neck cancers with a high cure rate.

He said that a sensitive spectrophotometric and high performance liquid chromatographic (HPLC) methods had been developed for the determination of cisplatin and carboplatin based on the pre-column derivatization of platinum.

He said that vanadium was an industrial hazard and added that high amounts of vanadium were said to be present in fossil fuels such as crude petroleum, fuel oils, some coals and lignite. Burning fuels released vanadium in the air that settled in the soils, he said and added that symptoms of vanadium poisoning were nervous depression, coughing, vomiting, diarrhoea, anaemia and increased risk of lung cancer.

He said that laboratory and epidemiological evidence suggested that vanadium at trace level might also play a beneficial role in the prevention of heart disease. Therefore, a liquid chromatographic method had been developed for the determination of vanadium from mineral ores and crude petroleum oil, he said.