Today I will discuss the benefits of liquid biopsies in the blood testing of tumour development. Liquid biopsy is basically a liquid biomarker that results in blood tests that detect cancer cells or DNA that tumours shed into the blood. The three benefits of liquid biopsies in the blood testing of tumour development that I will discuss about is the early response of the detection on the tumour, effect on the non invasive procedure, and last, understanding what molecular changes are happening to the tumour in real time.
To begin, I will discuss about the benefits of early response in liquid biopsies. …show more content…
Rather than staging and monitoring cancer using tumor tissue, the liquid biopsy enables a serum testing to identify specific biomarkers that can help direct the course of the treatment. A liquid biopsy provides an alternative sample type when solid tumor sampling is unavailable or difficult to obtain. In some cases a patient may have had a biopsy, but it has been exhausted, not allowing further diagnostic tests to be performed. In other instances, it may be quite difficult to obtain a biopsy from a patient due to tumor location. For example, tumors in bone, brain, lung, pancreas, or other organs may be hard to access, or could put the patient at risk due to the invasive nature of the …show more content…
On September 9, 2015 the 16th World Conference on Lung Cancer, Vince O’Neill, M.D., Chief Medical Officer stated that, “Our non-invasive liquid biopsy test for non-small cell lung cancer offer physicians and their patients a number of critical advantages to help ensure maximum detection sensitivity.”
The development of non-invasive methods to detect and monitor tumours continues to be a major challenge in oncology. Further, tissue biopsies can fail to contain adequate tumor tissue for biomarker analyses. In these instances, it is believed that a blood-based liquid biopsy, can provide accurate biomarker information to better guide therapy. For most cancers, a tissue biopsy is quite challenging in that it is also painful, or in some cases risky for the