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DARIA USTIUGOVA
Most biomarkers that clinicians use to diagnose cancer are human. But growing evidence for a link between the microbiome and malignancy presents an opportunity to look at the presence of microbial DNA as a way to identify and possibly predict disease. In a study published June 23 in Genome Biology, researchers demonstrate that it is possible to detect bacterial DNA in blood samples in both healthy people and melanoma patients.
“This is yet another manuscript that demonstrates that you can identify microbial signatures in the blood, but there are a lot of nuances with these [identification] strategies to date—particularly when it comes to possible contamination,” says Jennifer Wargo, a melanoma surgeon at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Texas who was not involved in the study. “There’s definitely a lot of promise, but it’s early days and these strategies need to be optimized and, ideally, standardized.”
Stephen ...
