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Updated: Sep 5, 2025
Detection of Cell-Free DNA in Blood Plasma Samples of Cancer Patients
Published on: September 9, 2020
A novel method for extracting circulating cell-free DNA from whole blood samples and its utility in the non-invasive
Hongbin Zhong1, Liuhong Zeng1, Mengyuan Tao1
1Clinical Laboratory of BGI Health, BGI-Shenzhen, Shenzhen, China.
Objective:
We verified a magnetic bead-based, simple, and fast method for circulating cell-free DNA (cfDNA) extraction from whole blood samples(CEWB) and characterised its utility in non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT).
Method:
We extracted cfDNA from both plasma and whole blood of the patients using CEWB and compared it to that extracted using a Qiagen extraction kit; droplet digital polymerase chain reaction test was used to calculate the fragment size bias. In all, 304 samples were used for NIPT.
Results:
The CEWB group (mean ± standard deviation [SD]: 4.34 ± 0.41 ng/ml plasma) reported less DNA weight yield than the Qiagen group (4.90 ± 0.50 ng/ml plasma). There was no significant difference between the CEWB group and the Qiagen group in the gene fragments (136 bp: p = 0.064 and 420 bp: p = 0.534). In a parallel cohort study to characterise the utility of the CEWB method in NIPT, the treatment group extracted by CEWB showed a sensitivity of 100%, a specificity of 99.65%, and a positive predictive value of 95%.
Conclusions:
This study demonstrated that CEWB achieves an acceptable yield of DNA without contamination from genomic DNA. Subsequent clinical experiments in a parallel cohort indicated its utility for NIPT.
