*This article was taken from *The WIRED World in 2016 --our fourth annual trends report, a standalone magazine in which our network of expert writers and influencers predicts what's coming next. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
When cells die in our body, they burst, shedding DNA, which ends up in our blood flow. Cells can die for many reasons: from a natural process of ageing, as a result of disease or organ death. They also die at every stage in life. Even as a foetus grows, the continuous death of its cells means that its DNA is transferred through the placenta into the blood of the mother. A mother's blood has about ten full foetal genomes per millilitre, which means that a foetus's DNA can be sequenced while still in the womb.
The same process happens with cancer. Cancer cells, due to their fast growth, die quickly, constantly shedding their DNA into the bloodstream, even at an early stage of the disease. Detecting cancerous DNA would enable much earlier detection.
Recently, Dennis Lo, a chemical pathologist at the Chinese University of Hong Kong who invented the maternal blood-DNA test, performed a cancer biopsy while tracking the tumour's DNA concentration in the patient's blood. Performing blood tests every 15 minutes, his team showed that as the tumour was removed, levels of its DNA in the blood dropped. "If you take a patient's sample of blood, you can find the tumour DNA," says Clive Brown, CTO of biotech company Oxford Nanopore. "If part of the tumour is missed, you can still spot its DNA in the blood, so you can know if the surgery has been successful or not."
Lo couldn't track the DNA concentration in real-time, but in 2016, we will be able to use portable sequencers such as Oxford Nanopore's MinION, a USB-stick device that uses nanopore technology to sequence DNA on the spot. "DNA changes all the time," Brown says. "If you drink alcohol, your liver cells start to die -- they shed DNA and your gene expression changes. If you get infections or a virus, you'll have that DNA in the blood. If you think of your blood as like a sewer, everything is in it -- and it's dynamic. There's a lot of stuff in there that's irrelevant, but you can measure a baseline and then, one day, something changes -- some new things appear that aren't there normally."
MinIONs are already being used in a variety of ways, from tracing illegally traded timber to Ebola sequencing. The next step, according to Brown, is to connect all the genetic information to the internet.
In 2013, Oxford Nanopore founded a spin-off company called Metrichor, which provides cloud-based analysis of its users' biological data, in real time. The goal is not only to help individuals, but to spot trends aggregated from thousands of users, a concept that Brown calls the internet of living things. "With companies such as 23andMe, you spit into a tube, send it away, and wait for the results," Brown says. "We're going to replace them. Now you can use your MinION, take a drop of blood and get an inventory of all DNA in your blood. You will be able to spot trends and track your data continuously. Once we get enough people doing that regularly over a long enough period, you can build up an enormous database of real-time data. We'll break the stronghold of doctors and insurance companies when millions of people are sharing this information."
João Medeiros is WIRED's science editor and editor of our R&D section
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
