A team led by researchers at Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and Harvard Medical School has developed a new method to identify thousands of DNA mutations accurately and efficiently in a patient’s blood sample with minimal sequencing. The approach, called MAESTRO, could one day enable the detection of residual cancer in patients who have undergone treatment, alerting doctors to disease recurrence earlier and more cheaply than current techniques allow.
“The ability to find rare mutations in a clinical sample is useful in many areas of biomedicine and diagnostics,” explained co-senior author Viktor Adalsteinsson, associate director of the Gerstner Center for Cancer Diagnostics at the Broad Institute. “Current techniques require a great deal of sequencing to find low-abundance DNA fragments, whereas MAESTRO is sensitive enough to find thousands of mutations with a hundred times less sequencing.”
The work is published this week in Nature Biomedical Engineering with additional co-senior authors Todd Golub, director of the Broad Institute and faculty at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI) and Harvard Medical School (HMS), and Michael Makrigiorgos, professor at DFCI and HMS.
