Post by Aíma

🇬🇧 Destination: London Calling 2026! At Aíma, we are excited to head to London from May 20-21 to present our latest breakthrough in cancer monitoring: Native methylation Oxford Nanopore Technologies sequencing for tumor-agnostic MRD detection. The Problem: Traditional mutation-based liquid biopsies often hit a wall—they lack sensitivity at low tumor burdens and simply fail when a patient has no detectable mutations. Our Solution: We’ve developed a "mutation-agnostic" approach using shallow whole-genome sequencing (sWGS) on the ONT platform. We extract native DNA methylation and fragmentation features directly, without the need for complex bisulfite conversion. The Data, that we will show on our Poster: Our AI-driven model was tested on 237 plasma samples across multiple cancers (Breast, Lung, Colorectal, Prostate, and more) with striking results: - Solving the "Mutation-Negative" Gap: We achieved a 70% sensitivity in active cancer samples where no tumoral mutations were detected by routinely used methods. - High Performance: perfect sensitivity for samples with VAF > 2% and very high for VAF between 0.2% and 2%. - Precision: A very high specificity in healthy donors. - Benchmarked Reliability: Our results also exhibit very high correlation with short-read platforms (TAPS+/Element Biosciences), proving that native Nanopore sequencing is ready for the big stage. Why it matters for the clinic: Beyond the accuracy, this workflow is built for the real world. With a fast turnaround time of less than 72 hours, it provides a scalable and cost-efficient path for clinical MRD deployment. 🧬 #LondonCalling2026 #OxfordNanopore #LiquidBiopsy #Oncology #Bioinformatics #MRD #Epigenetics #Aíma #CancerResearch #DNAmethylation