Technologies

Dr. Sanford Markowitz and his colleagues have discovered a particular human genomic DNA region, starting within and extending beyond the C6Orf150 genomic locus, in which the cytosines within CpG dinucleotides are differentially methylated in tissues from human cancers (e.g., colorectal neoplasias) and unmethylated in normal human tissues. Further, they have deduced that the levels of C6Orf150 transcript in tissues from human cancers are lower than the levels of C6Orf150 transcript in normal tissues. Further, nested PCR data indicate high specificity and technical sensitivity of the biomarker, which would provide the capability of picking up additional cases when using a panel of several markers. Therefore, this technology provides a highly specific and sensitive diagnostic method to detect aberrant methylation and associated likelihood that a human patient has colon cancer.