Posted: 3/20/2015
Trigger
Recently read Liquid Biopsy Fast DNA-sequencing machines are leading to simple blood tests for cancer. I strongly believe liquid biopsy as described in this article has huge potential.
This is another blog post in a series on the topic of Cancer Is History!
China Is Leading
I am convinced that countries like China and India will make lots of valuable contributions in coming decades to science & technology.
China is also facing enormous pressure to fight cancer. E.g. according to the above article “Of all the people worldwide who die of cancer each year, some 27 percent are Chinese.” And the numbers of Chinese people affected by cancer is increasing.
No wonder that the article covers a Chinese researcher, Dennis Lo, who for nearly 20 years pursues “a technique called the “liquid biopsy,” which is meant to detect liver and other cancers very early—even before symptoms arise—by sequencing the DNA in a few drops of a person’s blood.”
“He is well known for having been the first to show that a fetus sheds bits of its DNA into the bloodstream of its mother. That finding, first made in 1997, has in recent years led to a much safer, simpler screening test for Down syndrome. By now more than one million pregnant women have been tested.”
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