Liquid Biopsy Breakthrough for Early Stage Cancer Detection

Professor Dennis Yuk Ming Lo, associate dean of medicine at Chinese University, has developed a new method called liquid biopsy, which he claims can detect many kinds of cancer at a very early stage. Lo’s method decodes millions of DNA fragments in a human’s blood with the use of a DNA-sequencing machine. The results are then compared to that of a normal human genome or a complete set of human DNA. Researchers can now spot rearranged DNA patterns – a significant sign of a tumor. The liquid biopsy technology, cited by MIT Technology Review, is the result of over 20 years of research.