ABOVE: DNA and RNA from bacteria that live inside human tumors, such as these Serratia marcescens bacteria (green) in human pancreatic cancer cells, could serve as blood-borne biomarkers.
LEORE GELLER AND RAVID STRAUSSMAN, WEIZMANN INSTITUTE OF SCIENCE, ISRAEL
The paper
G.D. Poore et al., “Microbiome analyses of blood and tissues suggest cancer diagnostic approach,” Nature, 579:567–74, 2020.
When Greg Poore was a freshman in college, he lost his grandmother to pancreatic cancer. “She . . . essentially had 33 days from diagnosis to death,” he recalls. “No one could explain why they hadn’t detected the cancer before.” Three years later, in 2016, as an MD/PhD student in Rob Knight’s lab at the University of California, San Diego, Poore began investigating microbial inhabitants of tumors—and eventually, whether he could find traces of those microbes in the blood that might be used to diagnose patients earlier.
Poore and his colleagues used machine learning ...
