Ash Alizadeh, MD, PhD (Damon Runyon Clinical Investigator ’14-’17) and colleagues at Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, developed an enhanced technique that significantly increases the ability to accurately identify and sequence DNA from cancer cells circulating in a person’s blood. The technique, called “iDES-enhanced CAPP-Seq,” can be used to non-invasively identify tumor-specific mutations. The hope is that such “liquid biopsies” of easily obtained blood samples could eventually replace the need to surgically obtain tumor tissue for analysis. Their results were published in Nature Biotechnology.
