By: Deborah Johnson Wood
Every newborn in the United States undergoes a “heel stick,” a method of drawing blood from the infant’s heel and depositing it on paper in five droplets. Van Andel Institute researchers have developed a process of analyzing those droplets for genetic markers that could help bioscience investigators detect the likelihood of some infants developing serious diseases in later life.
VAI researchers James Resau and Peterson T. Haak, lead author of the study, teamed up with physician Nigel Paneth and others from Michigan State University’s College of Human Medicine, College of Osteopathic Medicine and Department of Physiology to determine if genes could be detected in several nine-year-old blood spots.
“We found over 3,000 genes in each sample,” says Resau. “That says that we can do personalized medical screening to provide additional information. Perhaps that information will be evidence of cancer before the appearance of the disease, and we could intervene.”
Resau says a physician would know which of his or her newborns develop cancer or other disease. That doctor could go back to the child’s blood spots, with the parents’ permission, and determine if a genomic signature might have indicated the disease was present.
Michigan has 50 years’ worth of infant blood spots in a repository at the Michigan Department of Community Health.
The Van Andel Institute researchers have applied for a grant to fund the next steps: using infant blood spots to look for genetic markers of neuroblastoma, a brain cancer that only happens in infants one-year-old and younger, and Wilms tumor, a kidney cancer of newborns.
Source: James Resau, Van Andel Institute
Deborah Johnson Wood is development news editor for Rapid Growth Media. She can be contacted at [email protected].
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