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The coronavirus pandemic, which appeared in Wuhan, China, in December 2019, rapidly spread all over the world in only a few weeks. Faster testing techniques requiring less resources are key in managing the pandemic, either to enable larger scale testing or even just provide developing countries with limited resources, particularly in Africa, means to perform tests to manage the crisis. Here, we report an unprecedented, rapid, reagent-free and easy-to-use screening spectroscopic method for the detection of SARS-CoV-2 on RNA extracts. This method, validated on clinical samples collected from 280 patients with quantitative predictive scores on both positive and negative samples, is based on a multivariate analysis of FTIR spectra of RNA extracts. This technique, in agreement with RT-PCR, achieves 97.8% accuracy, 97% sensitivity and 98.3% specificity while reducing the testing time post RNA extraction from hours to minutes. Furthermore, this technique can be used in several laboratories with limited resources.

Abstract. At present, breast cancer is the most common type of cancer in females. The majority of cases are sporadic, but 5-10% are due to an inherited predisposition to develop breast and ovarian cancers, which are transmitted as an autosomal dominant form with incomplete penetrance. The beneficial effects of clinical genetic testing, including next generation sequencing (NGS) for BRCA1/2 mutations, is major; in particular, it benefits the care of patients and the counseling of relatives that are at risk of breast cancer, in order to reduce breast cancer mortality. BRCA genetic testing was performed in 15 patients with breast cancer and a family with positivity for the heterozygous c.6428C>A mutation of the BRCA2 gene. Informed consent was obtained from all the subjects. Genomic DNAs were extracted and the NGS for genes was performed using the Ion Torrent Personal Genome Machine (PGM) with a 316 chip. The reads were aligned with the human reference HG19 genome to elucidate variants in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes. Mutations detected by the PGM platform were confirmed by target direct Sanger sequencing on a second patient DNA sample. In total, 4 BRCA variants were identified in 6 families by NGS. Of these, 3 mutations had been previously reported: c.2126insA of BRCA1, and c.1310_1313delAAGA and c.7235insG of BRCA2. The fourth variant, c.3453delT in BRCA1, has, to the best of our knowledge, never been previously reported. The present study is the first to apply NGS of the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes to a Moroccan population, prompting additional investigation into local founder mutations and variant characteristics in the region. The variants with no clear clinical significance may present a diagnostic challenge when performing targeted resequencing. These results confirm that an NGS approach based on Ampliseq libraries and PGM sequencing is a highly efficient, speedy and high-throughput mutation detection method, which may be preferable in lower income countries. IntroductionAt present, breast cancer is the most common type of cancer in females (1). The majority of cases are sporadic, but 5-10% are due to an inherited predisposition to develop breast and ovarian cancers, which are transmitted as an autosomal dominant form with incomplete penetrance (2,3). Germline mutations of BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes are involved in ~10 and 3-5% of ovarian and breast cancers, respectively (4,5). According to various professional society guidelines, BRCA1 and BRCA2 hereditary breast and ovarian cancer is characterised by: Multiple family members that possess breast, ovarian or both cancers; occurring at young ages or bilaterally in the case of breast cancer, triple-negative (estrogen receptor-, progesterone receptor-and human epidermal growth factor receptor 2/neu-negative) breast cancer and male breast cancer; and an increased risk of prostate, pancreatic and endometrial cancers (6,7). BRCA1 and BRCA2 are tumor suppressor genes associated with DNA damage recognition, double-strand break repair, checkpoint control, transcription regulation ...

Background: Hereditary breast and ovarian cancer (HBOC) is an autosomal dominant inherited cancer susceptibility disorder. Both BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes are considered as high penetrance genes of this syndrome. The identification of BRCA1/2 genetic alterations before cancer development, grant patients the chance to benefit from various medical cancer prevention approaches. Therefore, the appearance of recent advanced technologies in molecular analysis such as next generation sequencing has simplified full BRCA1/2 analysis. Many attempts took place in hope of understanding the molecular germline spectrum of these two genes in Moroccan HBOC patients. However, most of the past projects focused only on young breast cancer cases, lacked ovarian cancer cases in their cohort and only a limited number of these studies were able to analyze the entire exons or copy number variations for both genes. In attempt of gaining more information regarding the molecular profile of BRCA1/2 in HBOC, we conducted a study in which we analyze their molecular profile on selected Moroccan patients suspected of having HBOC syndrome. Methods: In this study we obtained blood samples from 64 selected Moroccan patients, who suffered from Breast and/or ovarian cancer and had a strong family history for cancer. To analyze BRCA1/2 punctual variants and copy number variations, we used the Ion Personal Genome Machine (PGM) and Oncomine BRCA1/2 research assay panel. Afterward, we correlated the molecular results with the clinic-pathologic data using IBM SPSS Statistics ver 2.

BackgroundTriple Negative Breast Cancer (TNBC) is an aggressive form of breast cancer, that represents 10–20% of all breast carcinomas and characterized by the lack of a specific cell surface marker compared to other breast cancer subtypes. Due to the absence of molecular markers for TNBC his treatment options remains limited, without proven targeted therapies, which emphasize the need for discovering molecular markers that could be targeted for patient treatment, An important number of TNBC cases harbor aberrations in the phosphoinositide 3-kinase (PI3K) pathway, leading to constitutive activation of the downstream signaling pathway. Among mechanisms of PI3K enhancement, PIK3CA mutations are most frequently (~ 30%) observed, along with protein loss of PTEN and AKT activation by phosphorylation (pAkt). Therefore, we propose to analyze clinocopathologic and molecular characteristics of PI3K/AKT/PTEN pathway in Moroccan triple negative breast cancer patients.MethodsWe conducted a retrospective study of 39 patients diagnosed with triple negative breast cancer between early 2013 and 2016. In this study, we used the Ion Personal Genome Machine (PGM) and Ion Torrent Ampliseq Cancer panel to sequence hotspot regions from PIK3CA, AKT and PTEN genes to identify genetic mutations in 39 samples of TNBC subtype from Moroccan patients and to correlate the results with clinical-pathologic data.ResultsAll patients were female with a median age of 46 years from (34–65). Most patients have had invasive ductal carcinoma (84.6%) and 69.2% of them were grade III SBR. Among the 39, 9 were right sided tumor patients and the remaining 30 were left-sided. Mutational analysis of PIK3CA gene was achieved in all TNBC patients. PIK3CA hotspot mutations were detected in 5/39 of TNBC (13%), in detail, among these 5 TNBC patients, one harbored mutation in exons 9 and four in exon 20.ConclusionThe PI3KCA gene is highly activated and plays a crucial role in the pathogenesis of TNBC more, therefore, may be a potential therapeutic target to improve outcomes in patients.