NCM 2022: Rapid leukemia classification using nanopore sequencing

Nanopore sequencing technology can generate high-resolution transcriptomic data in real-time and at a low cost, which heralds new opportunities for molecular medicine. We demonstrated the potential clinical utility of real-time transcriptomic profiling by processing RNA sequencing data from childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) clinical research samples on-the-fly with a trained neural network classifier. Our major findings were that the neural network was able to accurately classify 11 out of 12 leukemia samples, with as little as four minutes of sequencing needed to accurately classify ALL.