Liquid Biopsy Could Become The New Way Of Cancer Diagnosis
The traditional biopsy procedure is often painful and time-taking for the cancer patients. However, the importance of conducting a biopsy to see the changes in the tumor cells cannot be underestimated.
Recently, a team of researchers from the University of California's Comprehensive Cancer Center has come up with a new "liquid" biopsy technique that has the potential to become a groundbreaking alternative to the traditional biopsy.
While conducting the study, involving the new technique, the research team drew blood from the arm of the patient to analyze the DNA that a tumor usually drops in the blood stream. The team performed the same technique on more than 15,000 patients.
The liquid biopsy helped researchers identify 50 different types of tumors, which in turn, proved that the relatively new form of biopsy is able to accurately diagnose mutations that take place in the cancer DNA.
The researchers used a new genetic scan called Guardant360. This scan analyzes the cancer DNA in the bloodstream of the patients and looks for mutations in cancer-related genes. In this case, the scan looked for mutations in 70 different cancer-related genes. The most common forms of cancer in the study were lung cancer, breast cancer and colorectal cancer.
Dr. Joshua Brody of the Lymphoma Immunotherapy Program at Mount Sinai's Tisch Cancer Institute in New York City believes that liquid biopsy is indeed a "big deal" that could change the traditional practice involving the analysis of a piece of tissue from the patient's body.
Even though the study results are encouraging, it does not prove that the use of liquid practice can actually help improve patient outcomes. According to ASCO Chief Medical Officer Dr. Richard Schilsky, the study "provides important evidence on the road to proving the clinical utility of liquid biopsies."
The research team also compared the liquid biopsy result with that of genetic tests performed on the biopsied cancer tissue and discovered that the blood samples has the same mutations as tissues between 94 and 100 percent of the time.
