Study Concludes That Liquid Biopsies Can Help Guide Cancer Treatment

It now seems likely that liquid biopsies will have a well-defined and important role in the diagnosis of cancer and the screening of treated cancer patients for recurrences. The value of the procedure continues to improve due to new scientific discoveries (see:Scientific Breakthrough on the Correlation of Liquid Biopsies with Cancer Type) and a recent article was the most positive of any that I have read about the value of liquid biopsies (see:Liquid Biopsy Is Effective at Guiding Treatment of Lung Cancer, Study Finds). Below is an excerpt from it:...[T]wo years ago, Dr. Li and his colleagues [at Memorial Sloan Kettering] began a prospective clinical study to evaluate whether a liquid biopsy test could help guide treatment decisions for people with lung cancer....The authors conclude that liquid biopsy –guided treatment is “feasible, rapid, and useful.”....[Patients in the study] all had advanced-stage non-small cell lung cancer that either had no known mutation that could be targeted with a drug or had stopped responding to a targeted therapy. Their cancers had spread beyond the primary location. Each patient had the liquid biopsy test performed on a blood sample. About half of the patients (106) also had their tumor tissue genetically sequenced by MSK ’s DNA-sequencing platform, calledMSK-IMPACT, [a targeted test for mutations]. Among the most important benefits of the liquid biopsy was the quick turnaround time.....In the study, just over 45% of the patients were f...
Source: Lab Soft News - Category: Laboratory Medicine Authors: Tags: Clinical Lab Industry News Clinical Lab Testing Diagnostics Genomic Testing Lab Industry Trends Lab Processes and Procedures Medical Research Surgical Pathology Source Type: blogs