Hacker News Reader

That some circRNAs are lower in cancer than in normal tissue is a reliably detectable difference and is precisely what makes them an excellent biomarker.

There's additional evidence shown here: "Using circular RNA as a novel type of biomarker in the screening of gastric cancer". http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cca.2015.02.018

View on HN

I am aware of this study. Funny, how they show expression in deltaCT to make it appear higher in cancer ;). But regardless, the marker has a specificity of 0.62 - really that excellent? Such a high false-positive rate does not belong anywhere near a patient sample.

Our goal is to add additional markers to current candidates using our enrichment tech. It helps to remember that up until the ILMN/Solexa machine came online around 2005-6, we could not reliably detect (statistically) MAFs in heterogenous tumor samples below about 20% on the 454 platform (depending on how much cash you threw at the sample). Point is, our enrichment platform allows a deep dive into signals that have yet to be identified as reliable and low variance biomarkers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com