Patent ID: 7888008

Claim:
A method for evaluating the risk of cancer in a smoker by determining the concentration of circulating total DNA in a plasma specimen from said smoker, which comprises: 1) extracting the DNA from the plasma specimen obtained from a subject who smokes to create a target DNA sample; 2) adding to the target DNA sample: a) a mixture of oligonucleotide primers suitable for PCR amplification of a fragment of the human telomerase reverse transcriptase (hTERT) gene, wherein said fragment of the hTERT gene is from nucleotide position 13059 to nucleotide position 13156 of the sequence of GenBank accession no. AF128893, and b) an oligonucleotide probe, having at least one quencher and one reporter fluorophore at the 3′ and 5′ ends, able to anneal to a sequence within the region delimited by the primers, in suitable conditions for carrying out a PCR reaction, 3) adding a heat-stable DNA polymerase with 5′-3′ exonuclease activity and amplifying the hTERT gene fragment; 4) measuring the produced fluorescence; 5) quantifying the hTERT DNA copy number in the target DNA sample interpolating a calibration curve created with known amounts of DNA, wherein the concentration of circulating total DNA in a plasma sample is determined by quantification of hTERT copy number 6) correlating the hTERT copy number to the risk of cancer in the subject.