G Mike Makrigiorgos
Harvard Medical School, USA
Keynote: Oncol Cancer Case Rep
Circulating DNA is poised to become a widely used tool for repeated assessment of cancer mutation and methylation status during the course of therapy. Removing the high excess wild type DNA fraction from circulating DNA allows enrichment of variant DNA and boosts the potential of all endpoint detection technologies, including sequencing. We present nucleaseassisted mutation enrichment, NaME, a simple and powerful approach to remove wild type DNA from large gene pools simultaneously, in order to focus sequencing on clinically relevant DNA alterations. This single-step approach retains current sample preparation protocols almost unchanged and combines seamlessly with downstream technologies such as HRM, COLD-PCR, ddPCR and next generation sequencing. Application in clinical samples and liquid biopsies will be presented.
G Mike Makrigiorgos is a Professor of Radiation Oncology and Director of the Medical Physics & Biophysics Division at Dana Farber Cancer Institute and Brigham and Women’s Hospitals, Harvard Medical School. He also directs the DNA technology laboratory and the radiation pre-clinical facility. His research interests include the development of novel DNA technologies for molecular diagnostics in oncology and the identification of circulating cancer biomarkers. He is the inventor of several PCR-based techniques for molecular diagnostics, including COLD-PCR and NaME-PrO technologies. He is a Member of the Editorial Board of Clinical Chemistry and has published over 150 articles, reviews and book chapters.