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A novel, error-corrected technique for identifying cancer from blood samples is significantly more sensitive and accurate than previous methods and could be helpful for monitoring patients' disease status following treatment, according to a study by Weill Cornell Medicine and New York Genome Center investigators.
In the study, 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 tumour DNA. Adding an error-correcting method greatly improved the accuracy of the technique.
Blood-test-based "liquid biopsy" technology for early cancer detection and monitoring of cancer burden in patients could revolutionise cancer care. However, sensitively and accurately identifying the mutational signatures of cancer, just from tiny concentrations of tumor DNA in blood samples, has involved major challenges.