Measuring fragments of tumor DNA improves the detection of cancer in the blood
Measuring fragments of tumor DNA improves the detection of cancer in the blood
Measuring fragments of tumor DNA improves the detection of cancer in the blood
Florent Mouliere and his colleagues have designed a new method that has been able to detect hard-to-trace circulating tumor DNA (or cDNA). Their technique could overcome the cancer detection capacity of the methods in practice, by taking into account the differences in the size of the tDNA fragments, instead of the genomic changes in the tDNA.
The blood plasma of cancer patients contains DNA originating from primary or secondary tumors. The researchers suspected that calibrating the tDNA can offer a safe and non-invasive alternative compared to conventional biopsies, requiring only a small sample of blood.
However, cDNA is difficult to identify, since it is often outnumbered by much larger amounts of non-cancerous DNA that also circulates in the blood. Previous research has shown that fragments of circulating DNA from fetuses can be distinguished from maternal DNA due to their shorter length, a finding that helped improve the sensitivity of prenatal diagnosis. Inspired by this discovery, Mouliere et al. They used whole-genome sequencing to study the sizes of the tDNA fragments in 344 plasma samples from 200 cancer patients.
They thus identified enriched biological features in the cDNA associated with the cancer type of each patient and developed computational methods to select the specific size of the tDNA fragments.
The authors found that, by focusing on fragments between 90 and 150 base pairs, the unit of measurement of the genetic material, the detection of cDNA was improved in patients with brain, renal and pancreatic cancer. The authors state that the selection by size could impact the detection of other types of DNA (such as mitochondrial DNA) in body fluids. Ellen Heitzer and Michael publish a related Focus article. R. Speicher describes the study in greater detail. (Source: AAAS)
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