Douglas Steinberg | May 13, 2001 | 7 min read
Medical institutions across the United States will begin recruiting volunteers next month for a study that its investigators and outside observers describe as groundbreaking. They say it is the first large-scale trial to test the feasibility of using DNA shed by tumors to find early-stage cancer. During the three-year government-funded project, researchers will analyze DNA from stool samples to detect patterns characteristic of colorectal cancer (CRC). The study will have two other notable fe