MicroRNA Biomarkers Analyzed for 86% Accurate Cancer Diagnosis

Early and precise cancer diagnosis substantially improves patient survival.

Recent work has revealed that the levels of multiple microRNAs in serum are informative as biomarkers for the diagnosis of cancers. Researchers designed a DNA molecular computation platform for the analysis of miRNA profiles in clinical serum samples. A computational classifier is first trained in silico using miRNA profiles from The Cancer Genome Atlas. This is followed by a computationally powerful but simple molecular implementation scheme using DNA, as well as an effective in situ amplification and transformation method for miRNA enrichment in serum without perturbing the original variety and quantity information.

Researchers have successfully achieved rapid and accurate cancer diagnosis using clinical serum samples from 22 healthy people and people with lung cancer with an accuracy of 86.4%. This DNA computational platform should inspire more clinical applications towards inexpensive, non-invasive and rapid disease screening, classification and progress monitoring.

SOURCES- Zhang, C., Zhao, Y., Xu, X. et al. Cancer diagnosis with DNA molecular computation. Nat. Nanotechnol. (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41565-020-0699-0

Written by Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture.com

4 thoughts on “MicroRNA Biomarkers Analyzed for 86% Accurate Cancer Diagnosis”

  1. A number of drug tests DO use biomarkers as tests for treatment efficiency. But there is a sad history of the biomarkers not correlating as closely to actual health outcomes as we would hope.

  2. results show IFR for COVID19 is 0.26%. And if you’re a kid then you have a higher chance of dying from a lightening strike then COVID19.

  3. Let me first say that I’m in no way an expert on this but I do have an observation.

    One of the things that really slows down the search for an effective cure is the structure of the drug trials. The trials drag on for years while the researchers wait (impatiently) for patients to die. This is due to the fact that the trials study the percentage of patients that survived a certain period of time or something similar to that. It would be a huge step forward if you could use the biomarkers test as an alternative standard for the success of a drug.

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