Researchers at the Technical University of Denmark's (DTU) Systems Biology department have developed groundbreaking diagnostic technology that, based on a biopsy from a metastasis, can with 85 percent accuracy identify a cancer source.
The new technology has been dubbed TumorTracer. The method relies on an analysis of DNA mutations in cancer tissue samples from patients with metastasized cancers. Tests have been run on thousands of samples in which the primary tumor had already been identified.
The next step in the research will be to test the technology on patients with unknown primary tumors.
"We are very pleased that we can now use the same sequencing data together with our new algorithms to provide a much faster diagnosis for cancer cases that are difficult to diagnose, and to provide a useful diagnosis in cases which are currently impossible to diagnose," DTU Associate Professor Aron Eklund said. "At the moment, it takes researchers two days to obtain a biopsy result, but we expect this time to be reduced as it becomes possible to do the sequencing increasingly faster."
