Researchers are exploring the potential of liquid biopsy as a diagnostic tool for colorectal and lung cancers. A method called methylation-sensitive restriction enzyme digestion followed by sequencing (MRE-Seq) has been identified as a promising technique for detecting global hypomethylation patterns in liquid biopsy samples. This method can accurately diagnose colorectal and lung cancers and determine the cancer signal origin (CSO) using deep neural network (DNN) analysis. Methylation patterns in cell-free DNA (cfDNA) are being viewed as a potential genomic feature to detect the presence and origin of cancer.
The study involved 191 patients with stage I-IV cancers (95 lung cancers and 96 colorectal cancers) and 126 participants without cancer. The results showed high accuracy in detecting colorectal and lung cancers, with the combined specificity reaching 99.2%. The researchers believe that the MRE-Seq method is more suitable for early cancer diagnosis in liquid biopsy using minimal cfDNA in routine clinical testing. However, further multicenter studies are needed to validate these findings in different populations.