While the humble blood test has for long been the touchstone to catch diabetes, malaria and HIV, companies are now drawing on knowledge from human genetics to make blood tests smart enough to fish out several kinds of cancers. Earlier this month, Strand Life Sciences, a Bengaluru-based company, began offering a test called ‘STRAND LB’ that claims to be able to detect traces of a tumour “from a simple blood draw”. MedGenome, another company based in Bengaluru — also announced the launch of “ONCOTRACK”, another ‘liquid biopsy’ test. “Management of cancer will undergo a massive transformation in India with NGS (next-generation sequencing)-based liquid biopsies… ONCOTRACK is one such offering,” says MedGenome chairman Sam Santhosh in a press statement.

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