New blood test significantly improves cancer detection

Cancer is most treatable in its early stages, so finding innovative and non-invasive methods to diagnose cancer early on is crucial for fighting the disease. Liquid biopsies, which require just a simple blood draw, are an emerging technology for non-invasively testing for cancer using DNA or RNA sequencing of a patient's blood.

Assistant Professor of Biomolecular Engineering Daniel Kim and his lab are developing more accurate and powerful liquid biopsy technologies that take advantage of signals from RNA "dark matter," an understudied area of the genome. Kim's new research shows that this genetic material is present in the blood of people with cancer and can be identified to diagnose specific cancer types such as pancreatic, lung, esophageal, and others early in the course of the disease.

Kim's lab developed an RNA liquid biopsy platform that detects both protein-coding RNA and RNA dark matter in the blood, and showed that this new approach significantly improves the performance of liquid biopsy for cancer diagnosis.

A substantial portion of the noncoding RNAs are derived from repetitive elements, and these RNAs can travel out of the cell from which they originate and into the bloodstream. A healthy individual's blood typically would have very few of these repetitive noncoding RNAs. However, Kim's research has shown that even at the earliest stages of cancer, many of these repetitive RNAs are secreted out of cancer cells, making them potent biomarkers of early-stage disease.

Reference: Roman E. Reggiardo, Sreelakshmi Velandi Maroli, Vikas Peddu, Andrew E. Davidson, Alexander Hill, Erin LaMontagne, Yassmin Al Aaraj, Miten Jain, Stephen Y. Chan, Daniel H. Kim. Profiling of repetitive RNA sequences in the blood plasma of patients with cancer. Nature Biomedical Engineering, 2023; DOI: 10.1038/s41551-023-01081-7