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Detecting Multiple Types of Cancer With a Single Blood Test

Reporter and Curator: Irina Robu, PhD

Monitoring cancer patients and evaluating their response to treatment can sometimes involve invasive procedures, including surgery.

The liquid biopsies have become something of a Holy Grail in cancer treatment among physicians, researchers and companies gambling big on the technology. Liquid biopsies, unlike traditional biopsies involving invasive surgery — rely on an ordinary blood draw. Developments in sequencing the human genome, permitting researchers to detect genetic mutations of cancers, have made the tests conceivable. Some 38 companies in the US alone are working on liquid biopsies by trying to analyze blood for fragments of DNA shed by dying tumor cells.

Premature research on the liquid biopsy has concentrated profoundly on patients with later-stage cancers who have suffered treatments, including chemotherapy, radiation, surgery, immunotherapy or drugs that target molecules involved in the growth, progression and spread of cancer. For cancer patients undergoing treatment, liquid biopsies could spare them some of the painful, expensive and risky tissue tumor biopsies and reduce reliance on CT scans. The tests can rapidly evaluate the efficacy of surgery or other treatment, while old-style biopsies and CT scans can still remain inconclusive as a result of scar tissue near the tumor site.

As recently as a few years ago, the liquid biopsies were hardly used except in research. At the moment, thousands of the tests are being used in clinical practices in the United States and abroad, including at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston; the University of California, San Diego; the University of California, San Francisco; the Duke Cancer Institute and several other cancer centers.

With patients for whom physicians cannot get a tissue biopsy, the liquid biopsy could prove a safe and effective alternative that could help determine whether treatment is helping eradicate the cancer. A startup, Miroculus developed a cheap, open source device that can test blood for several types of cancer at once. The platform, called Miriam finds cancer by extracting RNA from blood and spreading it across plates that look at specific type of mRNA. The technology is then hooked up at a smartphone which sends the information to an online database and compares the microRNA found in the patient’s blood to known patterns indicating different type of cancers in the early stage and can reduce unnecessary cancer screenings.

Nevertheless, experts warn that more studies are essential to regulate the accuracy of the test, exactly which cancers it can detect, at what stages and whether it improves care or survival rates.

SOURCE

https://www.fastcompany.com/3037117/a-new-device-can-detect-multiple-types-of-cancer-with-a-single-blood-test

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4356857/

Other related articles published in this Open Access Online Scientific Publishing Journal include the following:

Liquid Biopsy Chip detects an array of metastatic cancer cell markers in blood – R&D @Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Micro and Nanotechnology Lab

Reporters: Tilda Barliya, PhD and Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN

https://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/2016/12/28/liquid-biopsy-chip-detects-an-array-of-metastatic-cancer-cell-markers-in-blood-rd-worcester-polytechnic-institute-micro-and-nanotechnology-lab/

Liquid Biopsy Assay May Predict Drug Resistance

Curator: Larry H. Bernstein, MD, FCAP

https://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/2015/11/06/liquid-biopsy-assay-may-predict-drug-resistance/

One blood sample can be tested for a comprehensive array of cancer cell biomarkers: R&D at WPI

Curator: Marzan Khan, B.Sc

https://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/2017/01/05/one-blood-sample-can-be-tested-for-a-comprehensive-array-of-cancer-cell-biomarkers-rd-wpi