New Approach to Liquid Biopsy Relies on Repetitive RNA in the Bloodstream

Posted on Sept. 12, 2023 by Lawrence Tabak, D.D.S., Ph.D

Its always best to diagnose cancer at an early stage when treatment is most likely to succeed. Unfortunately, far too many cancers are still detected only after cancer cells have escaped from a primary tumor and spread to distant parts of the body. This explains why theres been so much effort in recent years to developliquid biopsies, which are tests that can pick up on circulating cancer cells or molecular signs of cancer in blood or other bodily fluids and reliably trace them back to the organ in which a potentially life-threatening tumor is growing.

Earlier methodsto develop liquid biopsies for detecting cancers often have relied on the presence of cancer-related proteins and/or DNA in the bloodstream. Now, an NIH-supported research team has encouraging evidence to suggest that this general approach to detecting cancersincluding aggressive pancreatic cancersmay work even better by taking advantage of signals from a lesser-known form of genetic material called noncoding RNA.