Nat Med: A major breakthrough! Biomarker detection accurately detects early kidney cancer!

, July 8, 2020 /PRNewswire/
-- A new liquid biopsy method can detect kidney cancer with high precision, including small, localizedtumor
s that are usually curable but have no early detection, scientists sayThe report, published in the journal Nature Medicine,, suggests that if validated and widely used in larger trials, this non-invasive test could detect more early renal cancer that has not spread, reducing mortality from the disease"We hope to expand this study to a wider range of cancers earlier and to act earlier," said Toni Choueiri, M.D., co-author of the studyHe is director of Dana-Farber's Lank Reproductive UrologyCancerCenterestimates that by 2020, 73,750 new cases of kidney cancer will be diagnosed and about 14,830 will die from kidney cancerAbout 35 percent of cancers are diagnosed
only when they spread beyond the kidneys, making treatment more difficultSmall, early kidneytumors
usually without symptoms, and more and more people are accidentally discovering them in abdominal scans for other purposes However, imaging or other screening methods are not recommended for the general population to look for early renal cancer Initially, tests based on the methods described in the new report may be used to screen people with a family history of kidney cancer, or people with a history of kidney cancer, Choueiri said "Before we can make it completely mainstream, we need to look specificly at it," he said image source: A non-invasive liquid biopsy is a method of finding cancer-related DNA in the blood or other body fluids and is rapidly evolving into clinical applications as a means of detecting certain types of tumors early However, "kidney cancer is one of the hardest tumors to detect because it doesn't shed as much DNA as other tumors," said Matthew Freedman, M.D., a medical oncologist at Dana-Farber and co-author of the report "That's where the test did a great job because it could identify abnormal patterns in a small number of tumors shedding DNA This is a principle that proves that early diseases can be detected "
when blood samples were used to distinguish between kidney cancer patients and those without kidney cancer, the accuracy of the test was close to 100% This method is less accurate when testing urine samples, but the researchers believe that performance can be improved If the test is validated in a larger trial and is widely used in clinical practice, urine samples will even be less invasive than blood extraction the technique of the detection method is cfMeDIP-seq, i.e cell-free methylated DNA immunoprecipitation and high-throughput sequencing Other methods of fluid biopsy are to look for mutations in the tumor shed DNA to reveal the type and location of the cancer, while cfMeDIP-seq detects abnormal methylation, the chemical label scants added to the DNA, which does not change their genetic , but affects their function the method detected 99 patients with early and advanced kidney cancer, 15 patients with stage IV urinary tract transgenic cell carcinoma and 28 healthy cancer-free controls In analyzing serum with this test, the study looked at the "near-perfect" classification of patients at all stages of kidney cancer Although urine-based classifications are less precise, the authors write, "We believe that technical and computational optimization can improve performance." references( biovalleybioon.com) references: Biomarker test highly accurate in detecting-the-early-early-eithno-
of the renal cell cell cell cinoma using plasma and urine-free DNA methylomes , Nature Medicine (2020) DOI: 10.1038/s41591-020-0933-1