The Institut de Cancérologie de Lorraine [the Lorraine Institute of Oncology, or ICL] in collaboration with the Institut du Cancer Joliot Curie [the Joliot Curie Cancer Institute] in Dakar and the Cerba HealthCare Group has recently finalized research demonstrating that it is possible to diagnose certain cancers caused by the human papillomavirus (HPV) through a simple blood test.
Based on the innovative CaptHPV technique, this research recently published in the journal Clinical Cancer Research* raises the prospect of a non-invasive approach to diagnosing certain cancers and optimizing biological monitoring of patients receiving therapy.
A ten-year scientific endeavour combining the expertise of public and private players
Studies conducted in the last twenty years have shown that small fragments of DNA from tumour cells are present in the blood of people with cancer. However, these fragments are difficult to locate since they are mixed in with large amounts of “normal” DNA.
Faced with the difficulty of distinguishing between tumour DNA and non-tumour DNA, ICL teams concentrated their efforts on types of cancers caused by viruses, specifically human papillomaviruses (HPV). They decided to test the hypothesis that it was possible to diagnose cancers associated with these viruses, regardless of the type of cancer or type of virus, in a different way. The ICL teams drew upon an innovative technique called CaptHPV, initially created to analyse tumours. For this new study, the technique was adapted to be used in analysing blood samples. This method makes it possible to detect all types of HPV identified to date and to obtain their full characteristics using what is called next- generation sequencing or NGS.
In 2016, the CaptHPV clinical trial was set up by the ICL in collaboration with a medical team from Senegal (a country with a different prevalence of certain types of HPV than France) and Cerba HealthCare, an expert in tumour biomarker analysis