New Cancer-Detection Technology

A more effective technology for the diagnosis and prognosis of cancer has been developed that detects the patterns of abnormal DNA methylation arising in the serum and urine of patients during tumor formation and progression.

Called MethylPlex, the method is simple but is the most sensitive and overcomes barriers of time and cost that have made cancer screening based on DNA methylation impractical until now. MethylPlex microarray profiling of genome methylation is as simple and inexpensive as the profiling of gene expression. Key markers for detecting two initial types of cancer, prostate and esophageal, will be determined by analyzing the methylation patterns from hundreds of patients. MethylPlex is the product of Rubicon Genomics (Ann Arbor, MI, USA).

Hospitals and reference laboratories will use inexpensive, noninvasive MethylPlex diagnostic tests. The first tests will use serum or urine from patients with high prostate-
specific antigen (PSA) or other indications of prostate cancer to identify those cases that should be treated aggressively, preventing patients from having to undergo periodic biopsies or unnecessary surgeries. MethylPlex has equal potential for diagnosing other types of cancer, according to Rubicon. The company has discovered almost 1,000 new methylation sites associated with cancer, more than double the number discovered by other technologies in the past 10 years.

"MethylPlex is the key to unlocking this diagnostic potential because it produces high resolution maps of methylation for more than 10,000 genes in one day for less than U.S.$0.10 per gene,” noted Dr. Vladimir Makarov, founder and CSO of Rubicon Genomics. "This reduces the time and cost to discover and validate new markers by nearly 100-fold.”




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Rubicon Genomics