Speed Reading of DNA May Help Cancer Treatment

March 9, 2010 | Source: New York Times

Researchers at Johns Hopkins University have developed a way to monitor the progress of a patient’s cancer treatment using a new technique for rapidly sequencing, or decoding, large amounts of DNA.

It uses mitochondrial DNA as markers of cancerous cells, based on the finding that more than 80 percent of cancers had mutations in their mitochondrial DNA.