Tissue Biopsy for cancer detection may disappear soon: Simple blood plasma assay (a liquid biopsy) may be the method of cancer detection in future
Blood plasma, the straw-colored liquid component of blood that normally holds the blood cells in whole blood in suspension contains dissolved proteins, glucose, clotting factors, mineral ions, hormones and carbon dioxide and DNA. Plasma of cancer patients contains cell-free tumor DNA that carries information on tumor mutations and tumor burden. Though individual mutations have been probed earlier, for the first time a method has been developed ( by a team of researchers from UK) for tagged-amplicon deep sequencing (TAm-Seq) which resulted in screening 5995 genomic bases for low-frequency mutations. Using this method they identified cancer mutations present in circulating DNA at allele frequencies as low as 2%, with sensitivity and specificity of >97%.They identified mutations throughout the tumor
