A window to our health | Dennis Lo | TEDxCERN

Early in his career, Dennis Lo questioned why invasive and sometimes life threatening methods of diagnosing diseases in DNA, continued to take place. His research enabled him to develop a non-invasive technique for prenatal testing.

Today he shares with us how he hopes that with a similar technology a single blood test could be used in early cancer
detection.

"Dennis Lo is a professor of chemical pathology and developed a non-invasive technique for prenatal testing. From a small sample of a mother’s blood plasma, Lo discovered how to isolate and amplify the the baby’s DNA. This makes it possible for families to learn about the health of a developing fetus without risky procedures such as chronic villi sampling (CVS) and amniocentesis, which sometimes result in miscarriage. Lo’s research started as a side project while he was in medical school. Many of his contemporaries were also searching for for fetal DNA in the mother’s blood, but nobody had cracked the code. After several years of struggling, Lo had the unique idea to look for the baby’s DNA in the mother’s cell-free plasma.
“I thought, maybe we’ve been looking in the wrong place for the last 10 to 20 years,” Lo said.
After honing this technique for prenatal testing, Lo is now investigating its potential applications for early cancer detection."

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx