Soon, Super Sensitive Test To Detect Cancers, HIV

New Technique Soon, For Super Sensitive Test To Detect Cancers, HIV

The new technique developed increases the standard procedure with a powerful DNA detection technology. (Representational Image)

NEW YORK: Promise of a new technique developed by a team of chemists at Stanford University has shown that it is thousands of times more sensitive than current techniques for diagnosing disease - whether it is cancer or a virus like HIV .

Found more in laboratory experiments, the technique, described in the journal ACS Central Science, is being tested in clinical trials in the real world.

When a disease begins to grow in the body, the immune system responds by developing antibodies.

Fishing these antibodies or markers associated out of the blood is one way that scientists infer the attendance of a disease.

This involves designing a molecule that will bind to the biomarker, which is adorned with an identification "flag". Through a series of specialized chemical reactions, known as an immunoassay, researchers can isolate the biomarker flag and attached thereto to provide a measurement proxy disease.

The new technique, developed in the laboratory of Carolyn Bertozzi, a professor of chemistry at Stanford, increases this standard procedure with a potent DNA detection technology.

In this case, chemical flag replaced the series with a short strand of DNA, which can then be extracted from the sample using DNA isolation technologies that are much more sensitive than traditional detection possible for antibodies.

The researchers tested their technique, with its flag DNA signature against four commercially available tests for a biomarker for thyroid cancer.

It outperformed the sensitivity of them all, at least 800 times, and as much as 10,000 times.

By detecting disease biomarkers at lower concentrations, doctors could theoretically get diseases much earlier in its progression.

"The test of thyroid cancer has historically been a very difficult immunoassay because it produces a lot of false positives and false negatives, so it was unclear whether our test would have an advantage," said study co-author Peter Robinson .

"We suspect ours would be more sensitive, but we were pleasantly surprised by the magnitude," Robinson said.

Based on the success of the screening of the thyroid, the group has won a few grants to advance the technique in clinical trials for the detection of other diseases, including HIV.