Reliance's Strand Life Sciences secures Indian patent for blood-based early cancer detection

Strand Life Sciences, a subsidiary of Reliance Industries Ltd, on Tuesday said it has secured an Indian patent for an integrated platform that uses DNA analysis from a blood sample to detect cancer early, as the country grapples with a growing cancer burden.

The patented platform combines high-quality genome sequencing, rigorous quality control, biologically informed methylation and fragmentomic feature extraction—computational techniques that identify tumour-derived DNA from a simple blood draw—with machine learning. Together, these enable early cancer detection and prediction of the tissue where the cancer originated, the company said.

A key innovation covered by the patent is a method to derive methylation patterns through genome sequencing with minimal failure rates, improving the sensitivity of early cancer detection. Methylation refers to chemical tags on DNA that often undergo characteristic changes across the genome in cancer.

Early detection remains one of India's biggest challenges in cancer care. Around 1.5 million new cancer cases are diagnosed each year, according to the Global Cancer Observatory (GLOBOCAN) and the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR). Yet many patients are diagnosed only after the disease has reached an advanced stage, when treatment options are more limited and outcomes are poorer, the company said in a release.

Existing guideline-recommended screening programmes cover only a small proportion of cancers and are difficult to scale.

Scaling genomics-based screening

Strand said its platform could make large-scale early cancer screening more feasible as DNA sequencing costs continue to decline, without requiring significant expansion of local healthcare infrastructure.

“This patent reflects our commitment to developing scientifically rigorous, AI-enabled liquid biopsy technologies that can help detect cancer earlier from a simple blood sample. We believe this innovation represents an important step towards making precision cancer screening more accurate, scalable, and accessible," Ramesh Hariharan, chief executive, Strand Life Sciences, said in a statement.

Strand Life Sciences, acquired by Reliance Industries in 2021, is a genomics research and diagnostics company spun out of the Indian Institute of Science.

India's genomics testing market is projected to reach $2 billion by 2030, according to industry estimates. Experts attribute much of the market's growth to a roughly 50% decline in genome sequencing costs over the past five years, making testing increasingly accessible.