Personalized Blood Tests For Cancer Patients

Disorders Cure

oi-Staff

Friday, February 19, 2010, 13:18

Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center scientists introduce personalized blood tests for cancer using whole genome sequencing. It is the first of it's kind genome-based blood tests which can monitor tumor levels and determine cancer recurrence.

Boffins have used data from the whole genome sequencing of cancer patients to develop individualized blood tests which he believes can help physicians tailor patients' treatments.

"We believe this is the first application of newer generations of whole-genome sequencing that could be clinically useful for cancer patients.Using this approach, we can develop biomarkers for potentially any cancer patient." says Victor Velculescu, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of oncology and co-director of the cancer biology Johns Hopkins."

In a report on the work, published in the February 24 issue of Science Translational Medicine, show that unlike any other kind researches they are studying the rearrangements of large chunks of DNA rather than changes in a single DNA letter among billions of others. They term it their new approach Personalized Analysis of Rearranged Ends (PARE).

Such DNA rearrangements are widely known to occur exclusively in cancer cells, not normal ones, making them ideal biomarkers for cancer.

Using six sets of cancerous and normal tissue samples taken from four colorectal and two breast cancer patients, the Johns Hopkins team used next-generation DNA sequencing methods to catalogue the genome sequence data of each patient.

After investigators identified DNA rearrangements in patients' tumor samples, they looked for similar changes in DNA shed from tumors into the patients' blood.

Taking and matching these samples, they amplified DNA found in the blood and determined that these tests were sensitive enough to detect rearranged tumor DNA in these samples.