New York, April 13 -- A novel, error-corrected technique for identifying cancer from blood samples is significantly more sensitive and accurate than previous methods and could be helpful for monitoring patients' disease status following treatment, according to a study by Weill Cornell Medicine and New York Genome Center investigators.

The method, based on whole-genome sequencing of DNA, also represents an important step toward the goal of routine blood test-based screening for early cancer detection.

In the study, the researchers benchmarked the cancer-detection performance of a new commercial sequencing platform from Ultima Genomics.

They demonstrated that a low-cost platform such as this one enables a very high "depth" of coverage--a...