How Next-Generation Sequencing Could Change Cancer Care

Extract

Next-generation sequencing (NGS) has improved how clinicians better gauge risk of developing cancer and increasingly has helped doctors tailor therapies to treat cancers with specific genetic mutations.

As more clinics use NGS—techniques that probe millions of DNA fragments for mutations at a time—more changes are coming for both cancer prevention and care.

NGS To Improve Cancer Treatment

Genes consist of linear sequences of four DNA nucleotides, or bases. In humans, every cell with a nucleus contains a copy of the entire genome—more than 3 billion DNA base pairs. Sequencing, then, is figuring out the order of DNA bases in a genome and seeing whether any letters are out of order, called a mutation, or variant. Most variants are harmless, but some can put people at higher risk of developing cancer and other diseases. Older gene sequencing techniques can check only small fragments of DNA at a time. NGS, however, can scan many millions of base pairs—or the entire genome—for mutations at once. These sequence fragments are then checked against a reference genome to look for variants.