Nature: Liquid biopsy creates a new situation for precise cancer treatment

Cells that metastasize from a tumor to the blood can help doctors monitor the resistance of treatment drugs

Liquid biopsy can quickly find cancer biomarkers, which can help identify patients most likely to benefit from targeted therapy.

Comprehensive Cancer Anatomy

Researchers developing or testing targeted therapies rely on the ability to identify specific biomarkers, just as clinicians consider targeted therapies for patients.

The ctDNA analysis alone cannot clearly reveal the clonality of the tumor—whether it comes from a single somatic cell or multiple cells.

In order to obtain a more complete picture of the evolutionary status of tumors, researchers have begun to supplement ctDNA analysis by obtaining genome and expression characteristics from circulating tumor cells (CTCs).

Cancer often spreads to other sites through the blood, so CTCs are considered to be a possible source of fatal metastatic disease.

However, patients who have been treated with these drugs before often show an altered version of the receptor called androgen receptor splicing variant truncation-7 (AR-V7).

Comprehensive analysis to improve forecast

Combining CTCs and ctDNA analysis can make clinical predictions more powerful .

Epic Sciences is working with pharmaceutical companies to help identify and measure prognostic and predictive biomarkers that can be embedded in clinical trial designs.

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