BCD Method - a new way to detect tumor DNA in blood
Screening for sequence mutations has held high promise, it appears now that it is not a highly effective way for detecting tumor DNA in blood.
However, there is a unique and novel way to detect few molecules of cancer DNA on the background of normal DNA, it is not by examining the genetic sequence but rather by examining the “epigenetic” profile of DNA. Research pioneered by Moshe Szyf, a professor at McGill University and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada has taken almost three decades to establish the unique epigenetic characteristics of cancer cells and their DNA. Our team has identified a set of regions that are methylated in almost all cancers and are not methylated in any normal tissue examined and are therefore used to detect cancer in our assay.