January 18, Science has published the research Detection and localization of surgically resectable cancers with a multianalyte blood test led by scientists at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2018/01/17/science.aar3247

ARNA Genomics analyses the published results.

Cancer liquid biopsy is the hot field of modern science that attracts major attention both from medical and investment community. Lots of lives will be saved by early detection of cancer and lots of money¹ will be made along the way.

Several technologies are competing in the race of becoming the first widely applied liquid biopsy. Recently global audiences were impressed by the newcomer to the race: the technology called CancerSEEK publicized in the highly visible publication of Science magazine. Plasma of more than a thousand patients and volunteers blood has been analyzed to detect a presence of biomarkers of DNA and proteins concentration. Eight forms of cancer were detected with different sensitivity. The best-detected cancers were those of ovary and liver, the worst detected — breast cancer. Notably, detection of most cancers was significantly improved by machine learning.

These results fill ARNA team with optimism on their way to produce the most efficient liquid biopsy test for breast cancer. ARNA BC technique already shows lab results of sensitivity exceeding 95% while CancerSEEK barely exceeds 30% for breast cancer detection. In addition to that, we expect ARNA BC to be lower-cost and easier automatized. Such dramatic difference is rooted in three principal advantages of ARNA-BC technique. First, ARNA BC employs the proprietary set of genes obtained by the in-house nucleosome footprinting technology. Because of such intricate screening, ARNA set of genes appears to have both superior predictive ability towards breast cancer as well as a high presence in the blood plasma thus allowing for higher assay sensitivity. Second, because of this high sensitivity, ARNA BC does not need to detect protein biomarkers while CancerSEEK admits being impotent without them. Detecting protein biomarkers require cumbersome biochemical procedures that dramatically increase the minimal cost of the test. Finally, ARNA is designed to put test results in blockchain that immediately enhances opportunities for AI and machine learning implementation.

Breast Cancer testing is the most sought for application of liquid biopsy because of the nature of the disease. Early detection of breast cancer will bring especially dramatic improvement in the patient outcome, especially for BRCApositive patients. Because of that several other techniques compete with ARNA in this important field. All these techniques dramatically exceed results of CancerSEEK obtained for breast cancer detection, but in our opinion, they still are inferior in one or another way to ARNA BC. The most publicized approach is high-performance sequencing developed by the richly financed company called GRAIL. This great company runs multi-thousand patient clinical trial in Breast Cancer detection, but it carries a significant risk of not achieving high sensitivity while remaining high-cost technology. The other great company is ANGLE, but its technology is limited by working with circulating cancer cells that may be detectable in blood at the later stages then DNAs detected by ARNA.

Currently, ARNA starts its first official clinical trial and looks forward to proving the superiority of its technology and bringing the new unique life-saving tool to the millions of breast cancer patients around the world.