Introduction

The invention, applied in the clinical field, has the function of characterizing a specific genetic trait of patients affected by some tumoral pathologies (such as colon or breast cancer), with the aim of improving the prognosis and the choice of an optimal therapy.

Technical features

The scientific research in oncology is strongly focused on the analysis of the genetic and molecular mechanism underlying the cancer diseases: these biological markers can provide a prognostic indication on the aggressiveness of the tumor, and can represent a valid therapeutic target for specific pharmacological treatments.

Some genetic traits can influence disease outcome. The mentioned genetic trait, known as “ODC1 +316 A / G SNP”, has been associated with survival of patients with colon or breast cancer. Its characterization is therefore important to recognize the tumor aggressiveness and subsequently to choose an appropriate therapy. The technology consists of DNA molecules specifically designed to be used in clinical analysis techniques (called PCR) for the characterization of the mentioned genetic trait in patients’ DNA samples.

The methods normally used are long and expensive. The most immediate genotyping technique of a polymorphism consists in amplifying the genomic trait that includes the SNP by PCR, and consequently sequencing the product of the PCR itself. With this innovative system it’s estimated that a laboratory can take about 3 hours to analyze 20 samples.

Possible Applications

• Clinical testing laboratories in the treatment of patients suffering from certain cancer diseases.

Advantages

• Faster and more cost-effective with respect to existing sequencing techniques;
• High effectiveness and specificity;
• Non invasive for patients;
• Easy to adopt in any diagnostic labs already using standard PCR methodology;
• Potentially extendable to other kind of tumors.