JUST a drop of blood or urine might be enough to reveal if a patient has cancer, what type it is and whether it’s treatable.
“One day, there could be one biochip for analysing all cancers,” says Christian Piepenbrock, head of bioinformatics at Epigenomics of Berlin. Its technique distinguishes normal DNA from that of cancerous cells by detecting whether particular genes have been switched on or off by the removal or addition of methyl groups. It’s becoming clear that such changes play a big role in cancer: methylation can turn off protective tumour suppressor genes (Â鶹´«Ã½, 24 November 2001,…
