ABSTRACT
Cancer is a devastating disease whose incidence has increased in recent times and early detection can lead to effective treatment. Existing detection tools suffer from low sensitivity and specificity, and are high cost, invasive and painful procedures. Cancers affecting different tissues, ubiquitously express embryonic markers including Oct-4A, whose expression levels have also been correlated to staging different types of cancer. Cancer stem cells (CSCs) that initiate cancer are possibly the 'transformed' and pluripotent very small embryonic-like stem cells (VSELs) that also express OCT-4A. Excessive self-renewal of otherwise quiescent, pluripotent VSELs in normal tissues possibly initiates cancer. In an initial study on 120 known cancer patients, it was observed that Oct-4A expression in peripheral blood correlated well with the stage of cancer. Based on these results, we developed a proprietary HrC scale wherein fold change of OCT-4A was linked to patient status - it is a numerical scoring system ranging from non-cancer (0-2), inflammation (>2-6), high-risk (>6-10), stage I (>10-20), stage II (>20-30), stage III (>30-40), and stage IV (>40) cancers. Later the scale was validated on 1000 subjects including 500 non-cancer and 500 cancer patients. Ten case studies are described and show (i) HrC scale can detect cancer, predict and monitor treatment outcome (ii) is superior to evaluating circulating tumor cells and (iii) can also serve as an early biomarker. HrC method is a novel breakthrough, non-invasive, blood-based diagnostic tool that can detect as well as classify solid tumors, hematological malignancies and sarcomas, based on their stage.
