비침습적으로 신장암 진단하기

Small, early kidney tumors usually cause no symptoms, and increasingly are found incidentally in scans of the abdomen performed for another purpose. However, there is no imaging or other screening test recommended for the general population to look for early kidney cancers. 

Non-invasive liquid biopsies, which search for cancer-related DNA shed by tumors into blood or other body fluids, are moving rapidly toward clinical use as a means of early detection for some kinds of tumors. However, "kidney cancer is one of the hardest tumors to detect, because it doesn't shed as much DNA as other tumors,"

The test was nearly 100 percent accurate when used with blood samples to distinguish patients with kidney cancer from those known to be free of kidney cancer. The method achieves less accuracy in testing urine samples, but the researchers believe that performance can be improved.

The technical name for the testing method is cfMeDIP-seq, which stands for cell-free methylated DNA immunoprecipitation and high-throughput sequencing. Where other liquid biopsy methods search for mutations in tumor-shed DNA that reveal the type and location of cancer, cfMeDIP-seq detects abnormal methylation—the addition of chemical tags to DNA, which doesn't alter their genetic code but can affect their function.

 

기존의 liquid biopsy 방법이 뭔지는 모르겠지만, 방금 전에 리뷰한 뇌 종양이나, 이 논문에서 한 신장암이나 Gene의 specific한 code를 detection 하는게 아니라, abnormal methylation을 감지하는 방식으로 한다.

 

reference

Detection of renal cell carcinoma using plasma and urine cell-free DNA methylomes, Nature Medicine (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41591-020-0933-1 , www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0933-1