현재 위치：홈 > 뉴스현황 > Press Events > Liquid Biopsy Reads ...
저자： 업로드：2017-08-16 조회수：
Signs of cancer in the blood are known to include nucleic acids, whether freely floating or tucked inside circulating tumor cells or exosomes. And now it appears that telltale nucleic acids can also be tucked inside platelets. Although platelets lack nuclei and, consequently, RNA of their own, they may gather RNA in their travels, and this RNA could come from tumors.
To detect RNA that originates in tumor cells and ends up being absorbed by platelets, researchers in The Netherlands designed a liquid biopsy test called thromboSeq. The researchers found that their test could diagnose non-small-cell lung cancer with close to 90% accuracy by detecting tumor RNA absorbed by circulating platelets, also known as thrombocytes. Non-small cell lung cancers make up the majority of lung cancer cases. Encouraged by these results, the researchers suggest that thromboSeq might also show promise in detecting other cancers.
Detailed findings appeared in the journal Cancer Cell, in an article entitled “Swarm Intelligence-Enhanced Detection of Non-Small-Cell Lung Cancer Using Tumor-Educated Platelets.” By referring to swarm intelligence, the article reflects how thromboSeq makes use of particle-swarm intelligence (PSO), a kind of algorithm inspired by the way swarming birds, insects, and birds self-organize to efficiently adapt to their environment.
"Birds continuously adjust their location in the swarm relative to each other, thereby increasing the flock's coverage and, thus, the efficiency of the food-searching process," explained Myron Best, the first author of the current study and a researcher at the department of neurosurgery of the VU University Medical Center in Amsterdam and the Cancer Center Amsterdam. "We applied this natural phenomenon to our algorithms, which make use of the complex RNA repertoire present in platelets."
The “tumor-educated platelets” cited in the title refer to platelets that interact with tumors. Platelets in a cancer-free person will contain a different compilation of RNA than tumor-educated platelets.
“Here we demonstrate that particle-swarm optimization (PSO)-enhanced algorithms enable efficient selection of RNA biomarker panels from platelet RNA-sequencing libraries (n = 779),” wrote the article’s authors. “This resulted in accurate TEP [tumor-educated blood platelet]-based detection of early- and late-stage non-small-cell lung cancer...independent of age of the individuals, smoking habits, whole-blood storage time, and various inflammatory conditions.”
"Ultimately, the aim
of liquid biopsy-based cancer detect
