innuCONVERT Bisulfite Product Family - Brochure

Background information

The only effective way to combat a disease like cancer is to understand it. And as we work to understand cancer, analyzing DNA methylation has come to play an increasingly important role, providing more meaningful information on tumorigenesis, tumor progression and metastasis. Malignant tumors exhibit abnormal DNA methylation - following a pattern differing significantly from that of healthy tissue - at a very early stage in tumorigenesis and during tumor progression. In general, genome-wide methylation in tumor cells decreases (genome-wide hypomethylation), while individual genes are hypermeth-ylated (gene-specific hypermethylation). Hypomethylation predominantly affects repetitive elements, whereas hypermethylation is frequently found in the CpG islands of tumor suppressor genes. A technological breakthrough is on now the clinical horizon, with diagnostic tests that measure methylated DNA as a biomarker having already been approved and put to use for patient diagnoses]