New strategy may enable cancer monitoring from blood tests alone
Cornell Chronicle
Blood-test-based “liquid biopsy” technology for early cancer detection and monitoring of cancer burden in patients could revolutionize cancer care.
A new, error-corrected method for detecting cancer from blood samples is much more sensitive and accurate than prior methods and may be useful for monitoring disease status in patients following treatment, according to a study by Weill Cornell Medicine and New York Genome Center investigators.
The method, based on whole-genome sequencing of DNA, also represents an important step toward the goal of routine blood test-based screening for early cancer detection.
In the study, published April 11 in Nature Methods, the researchers benchmarked the cancer-detection performance of a new commercial sequencing platform from Ultima Genomics. They demonstrated that a low-cost platform such as this one enables a very high “depth” of coverage – a measure of the sequencing data quality – allowing investigators to detect extremely low concentrations of circulating tumor DNA. Adding an error-correcting method greatly improved the accuracy of the technique.
“We’re now entering an era of low-cost DNA sequencing, and in this study, we took advantage of that to apply whole-genome sequencing techniques that in the past would have been considered wildly impractical.”
Dr. Dan Landau, Bibliowicz Family Professor of Medicine, and a member of the Englander Institute for Precision Medicine and the Sandra and Edward Meyer Cancer Center at Weill Cornell Medicine, and a core faculty member of the New York Genome Center.
