Evaluation of digital PCR for clinical diagnostics
Polymerase chain reaction (PCR), the method that amplifies DNA sequences by multiple rounds of thermal cycling, has been used extensively throughout molecular research over the last 25 years. It has many different applications including gene expression analysis, DNA mutation detection, cloning and sequencing and, as a result, has been widely used in clinical medicine, forensics and biological research. In 1999, cancer research pioneers Kenneth Kinzler and Bert Vogelstein of Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore), modified the standard PCR method in order to improve its sensitivity for cancer diagnostics. They named this method digital PCR.