The field of oncology has a continual demand for novel biomarkers, and liquid biopsy represents a rapidly advancing frontier [1]. Among emerging biomarker classes, circulating RNAs provide unique and complementary information to DNA-based assays [2]. To capture this additional layer of information and extend our existing plasma-based profiling of DNA methylation and chromatin, we developed D-Plex cell-free RNA-seq, a comprehensive technology for the detection of all circulating RNA fragments in liquid biopsy.
D-Plex cell-free RNA-seq is offered both as a service and as a kit for laboratory implementation. Data analysis is available as a service or can be performed in-house by bioinformaticians using our published method [3].
By capturing a broad spectrum of cfRNA in plasma, including protein-coding RNAs, lncRNAs, pseudogenes, and sncRNAs (e.g., miRNAs), D-Plex cell-free RNA-seq expands opportunities for biomarker discovery.
The assay’s broad, non-biotype-specific design does not compromise robustness or reproducibility; instead, it delivers high accuracy even from low plasma input volumes.
Comprehensive cfRNA profiling with D-Plex cell-free RNA-seq provides superior diagnostic performance compared with miRNA-only approaches for breast cancer classification.
REFERENCES:
[1] Pardini B, Sabo AA, Birolo G, Calin GA. Noncoding RNAs in extracellular fluids as cancer biomarkers: The new frontier of liquid biopsies. Cancers (Basel). 2019;11(8):1170.
[2] Heitzer, E., Haque, I. S., Roberts, C. E. S., & Speicher, M. R. Current and future perspectives of liquid biopsies in genomics-driven oncology. Nature Reviews Genetics 20, 71–88, 2019.
[3] Hita et al., “MGcount: a total RNA-seq quantification tool to address multi-mapping and multi-overlapping alignments ambiguity in non-coding transcripts” BMC Bioinformatics. 2022 Jan 14;23:39.
