ANN ARBOR ? Rubicon Genomics reported that its ThruPLEXTM-FD Prep Kits contributed to the success of a breakthrough study recently published in Nature1 that showed that genomic data extracted from the plasma of cancer patients can be used to track drug resistance and potentially guide treatment.
The proof-of-principle study showed that by sequencing tumor exomes (the ?coding? elements of the genome) extracted from patient plasma samples, it is possible to track how metastatic cancer evolves to acquire resistance to cancer therapy. In patients with advanced breast, lung and ovarian cancers, the researchers derived tumor sequences using plasma samples taken during multiple courses of treatment.
They were able to identify mutations associated with the emergence of resistance to cancer drugs including cisplatin, tamoxifen and gefitinib. The authors concluded that this non-invasive ?liquid biopsy,? based on tumor DNA that is released into the circulation, offers important advantages and could complement current invasive biopsy methods that can be uncomfortable and costly.
ThruPLEX-FD Prep Kits are designed to provide sensitive and consistent sequencing from challenging samples containing small amounts of degraded DNA with minimum hands-on time. They leverage Rubicon?s patented DNA repair and ligation methods to deliver more rapid and sensitive sequencing of plasma, formalin-fixed, ChIP and other fragmented DNA samples with increased throughput.
For this study, the scientists used ThruPlex-FD to prepare libraries from very small quantities of circulating DNA extracted from plasma (as small as 2.3 ng of DNA.) After enriching for the exome fraction, pair-end sequencing of the samples were performed on an Illumina HiSeq 2500.
