Blood Circulating Nucleic Acid Enrichment Technique Enables Non-Invasive Liver Cancer Diagnosis

The ability to diagnose diseases early can significantly enhance the effectiveness of clinical treatments and improve survival rates. One promising approach for non-invasive early diagnosis is the use of circulating cell-free nucleic acids found in blood. However, efficiently extracting these nucleic acids has posed a significant challenge. Now, researchers have developed an effective method for enriching trace amounts of circulating nucleic acids present in blood that could enable early disease diagnosis.

The new blood circulating nucleic acid enrichment technique developed by a research team from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS, Beijing, China) is based on MOF (metal-organic framework) materials and demonstrated higher enrichment efficiency than commercial reagent kits as well as prevented RNA degradation. Furthermore, by combining this innovative technique with high-throughput sequencing and bioinformatics analysis, the team has been able to identify serum biomarkers of cell-free RNA for the non-invasive diagnosis of liver cancer. A detection model developed by the team showed that it was capable of identifying liver cancer with a diagnostic accuracy of 90% in a validation sample cohort, showcasing its potential for the non-invasive diagnosis of liver cancer.

Image: MOF materials efficiently enrich cfDNA and cfRNA in blood through simple operational process (Photo courtesy of Science China Press)

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