What Products Will Ultimately Win in Diagnostics?

It turns out there are actually several classes of diagnostic technologies that seem like they are really hot right now, but are actually overhyped, according to a panel of laboratory experts who addressed the subject during the recent J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco, CA. Perhaps one of the hottest topics that have emerged in diagnostics over the past few years is liquid biopsy and while that technology is finding its way into hospital laboratories for certain applications, Nick Papadopoulos, a professor at Johns Hopkins University, said that in early detection of cancer, at least, liquid biopsy is still more hype than reality. "Early detection is the hardest of all applications [for liquid biopsy]," Papadopoulos said. "It's not that it's not going to work, necessarily, what I think is overhyped is how people claim it's going to work and how sensitive and how specific it's going to be." To elaborate on this point, Papadopoulos explained that with early detection the goal is to find cancer not before it occurs, but at the stage where it is most curable, which typically means before it has spread. At that stage, the material available to be tested is very small, and in order for that to work with liquid biopsy there needs to be a lot of technical improvements, he said. "What I think a lot of times people ignore is the actual biology and [whether or not we can] even detect certain tumors in plasma, for example. Can [circulating tumor DNA] alone solve the is...
Source: MDDI - Category: Medical Devices Authors: Tags: IVD Source Type: news