Patent ID: 8921070

Claim:
A method for in-vitro detection of bladder cancer, and deriving the stage of the cancer in a patient, comprising: (i) extracting DNA contained in a urine sample taken from said patient; (ii) fragmenting the DNA extracted In step (I); (iii) marking the obtained DNA fragments uniformly with a marking agent so as to form a pool of marked DNA; (iv) forming at least one aliquot from the pool of marked DNA and bringing each aliquot into contact with a set of reference DNAs, said contact being carried out under conditions enabling specific hybridization of the marked DNA fragments with said reference DNAs; wherein the set of reference DNAs consists essentially of sequences included in each of the following loci of the human chromosome: 1p, 3q, 8q22qter, 20, 5p12-p13, 9p, 9q, 18q12, 1q22-q24, 5p, 6q22, 7, 11q13, 12q15, 13q, 15, 16, 17q, 6q25-q27, 7q, 8p, 10q, 11p, 14q22-qter, 17p, 19 and 22, and wherein the reference DNAs are at least 30 bases in length; (v) eliminating the marked DNA fragments which are not specifically hybridized to the reference DNAs; (vi) determining the intensity of the signal produced by the marked fragments hybridized to each of the selected reference DNAs; (vii) determining, for each reference DNA, the deviations between the signals obtained In comparison with those obtained with a control DNA from a healthy patient; and (viii) deriving the patient's cancer stage from said observed deviations.