May 22 (UPI) -- Researchers have developed a new way to diagnose cancer with greater accuracy before tumors are detected using imaging by instead testing for tumor cell DNA in the blood.
Patients with very early stages of cancer have DNA from tumor cells circulating in their blood long before an actual tumor develops, researchers say, which may allow for earlier treatment of the disease.
The team from the University of Gothenburg's Sahlgrenska Academy in Sweden and Boston University have improved upon a technique that searches for DNA from tumor cells in blood to diagnose cancer by increasing the sensitivity of detecting tumor DNA in blood a thousand times. They did so by eliminating the background noise from the measurements using DNA-barcoding.
"One of the benefits of the technique is that it makes use of available instrumentation, which means it can be applied in most labs," Anders Ståhlberg, a docent in molecular medicine at Sahlgrenska Academy, said in a press release. "We are not the first in the world to show that barcoding concept works, but in our case we have developed a fast and flexible method that is simple, flexible and cost-effective to use."
Tumor cell molecules can be discovered in a regular blood sample before a tumor is visible via imaging such as tomography, X-ray, ultrasound or MRI.
The ultra-sensitive mutation analysis Ståhlberg helped develop can identify individual tumor cell molecules within 10,000 healthy molecules.
"The method has major potential and should soon be ready for patients," said Goran Landberg, director of the Wallenberg Center for Molecular and Translational Medicine at the University of Gothenburg. "However, first the application need to be tested on patient material in clinical studies, there really is no way around that."
The technique also has the potential to identify patients at risk for relapse and can aid in the calibration of chemotherapy treatments to avoid under or overdosage.
The study was published in Nature Protocols.
