New Method for Cancer Detection

CapturePCR is a completely new method for analysis of ctDNA. It obviates time-consuming

and expensive DNA sequencing and bioinformatics and allows for cost-effective, rapid cancer

detection. So how does it work? This slide shows the chromosome fragments circulating

in the blood. The green disks are nucleosomes and the light blue circles are ctCF molecules.

Each of these has a little piece of DNA wound around it. The DNA is coloured either red

or yellow. The red DNA is the background sequences that we're not interested in and the yellow

DNA is the target sequences that we are interested in. If you look carefully, you'll see that

the healthy person on the left does have the yellow target sequences, but only attached

to nucleosomes, not attached to ctCF. On the right-hand side, the cancer patient has yellow

DNA sequences that are attached to ctCF. So if we can pull out the ctCF molecules and

remove all of the background nucleosomes, then what we're left with is this. On the

left, all of the DNA sequences are red. They're all background sequences. On the right, we

have target sequences attached to ctCF. If we look for a particular sequence, that will

remove all the other non-target sequences and we get pure cancer-derived DNA. This slide

shows briefly how we do it. We use an antibody to pull out all of the ctCF, regardless of

which DNA fragment is attached to it, and we then extract the DNA and analyse it for

the particular sequence we're looking at with a low-cost, simple PCR test, the same test

that you would use in principle for COVID. Our initial clinical results for CAPTURE PCR

show effective detection of solid and liquid cancers and at early stage 1 and 2 disease.

This may pave the way for a whole new class of undiscovered biomarkers.