Liquid Biopsies – News and Features

Using a liquid biopsy to detect circulating tumor DNA and analyze immune cells helps to predict patient response to immunotherapy in lung cancer patients.

Lymphatic fluid from surgical drains is usually thrown away, but researchers have discovered that it contains a biomarker that can guide head and neck cancer treatment.

Circulating tumor DNA predicts recurrence and splits disease into two subgroups in Stanford Medicine-led study of Hodgkin lymphoma. New drug targets or changes in treatments may reduce toxicity.

This article explores how biopharmaceutical organizations seeking to remain competitive must adopt innovations, like cell-free long DNA synthesis, to unleash the potential of synthetic biology and accelerate therapeutic development across all facets of genetic medicine.

By leveraging a unique, competitive reaction between two different crRNAs, researchers simplify CRISPR technology, making it a more effective tool for sensitive nucleic acid detection.

Researchers developed a non-invasive genetic test that can screen the blood of pregnant individuals to survey all genes from the fetal genome. The blood test approach is potentially scalable.

Blood tests for circulating tumor DNA could be used to detect cancer 18 months prior to clinical diagnosis by CT scan, jumpstarting diagnosis and enabling patients to start targeted therapy quickly.

A model based on artificial intelligence is able to predict the therapy outcome in 80% of ovarian cancer patients. The tool, named IRON (Integrated Radiogenomics for Ovarian Neoadjuvant therapy), analyzes various patient clinical features.

In this opinion piece, Neil Ward explores how advances in sequencing could help to provide new insights for rare disease patients.

A liquid biopsy that identifies cell-free DNA as a marker of cancer could improve cancer detection in patients with Li-Fraumeni syndrome, which carries an almost 100 percent lifetime risk of developing cancer.