Next Generation Sequencing

Helicos Biosciences have announced a partnership with the Children’s Oncology Group (COG) where Helicos will use their NGS platform to experimentally characterize different tissue types from patients with Ewing’s sarcoma, a rare cancer.

In their press release they state that:

These samples include a normal bone marrow sample and tumor cell lines derived from a Ewing’s sarcoma primary tumor biopsy and the metastasis from the same patient obtained after two cycles of chemotherapy. It is hoped that an in-depth comparison of genomic DNA sequence and RNA expression between the normal tissue, primary tumor, and treatment resistant metastasis will reveal structural and functional genomic changes associated with clinical aggressiveness and treatment resistance.

The study will include an ambitious range of applications for NGS technology as it will aim to identify rare mutations, polymorphisms, copy number variants, true whole-genome RNA transcriptional activity, and global methylation patterns.

The press release does not mention anything about the tissue sample sizes that will be collected as starting material, so I guess I will have to read the papers at some point . However, the ability to characterize very small tissue samples is one of the most interesting features of the single molecule sequencing technologies, so it will be interesting to see how the technology performs for this type of problems.