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.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, 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.