scholarly journals Delivering on the promise of early detection with liquid biopsies

Author(s):  
David Crosby

AbstractLiquid biopsy approaches are relatively well developed for cancer therapy monitoring and disease relapse, but they also have incredible potential in the cancer early detection and screening field. There are, however, several challenges to overcome before this potential can be met. Research in this area needs to be cohesive and, as a driver of research, Cancer Research UK is in an ideal position to enable this.

Cancers ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 824
Author(s):  
Felix I. L. Clanchy

Sarcomas are mesenchymal tumours that often arise and develop as a result of chromosomal translocations, and for several forms of sarcoma the EWSR1 gene is a frequent translocation partner. Sarcomas are a rare form of malignancy, which arguably have a proportionally greater societal burden that their prevalence would suggest, as they are more common in young people, with survivors prone to lifelong disability. For most forms of sarcoma, histological diagnosis is confirmed by molecular techniques such as FISH or RT-PCR. Surveillance after surgical excision, or ablation by radiation or chemotherapy, has remained relatively unchanged for decades, but recent developments in molecular biology have accelerated the progress towards routine analysis of liquid biopsies of peripheral blood. The potential to detect evidence of residual disease or metastasis in the blood has been demonstrated by several groups but remains unrealized as a routine diagnostic for relapse during remission, for disease monitoring during treatment, and for the detection of occult, residual disease at the end of therapy. An update is provided on research relevant to the improvement of the early detection of relapse in sarcomas with EWSR1-associated translocations, in the contexts of biology, diagnosis, and liquid biopsy.


2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jun Hou ◽  
XueTao Li ◽  
Ke-Ping Xie

AbstractEarly detection and diagnosis are the key to successful clinical management of pancreatic cancer and improve the patient outcome. However, due to the absence of early symptoms and the aggressiveness of pancreatic cancer, its 5-year survival rate remains below 5 %. Compared to tissue samples, liquid biopsies are of particular interest in clinical settings with respect to minimal invasiveness, repeated sampling, complete representation of the entire or multi-site tumor bulks. The potential of liquid biopsies in pancreatic cancer has been demonstrated by many studies which prove that liquid biopsies are able to detect early emergency of pancreatic cancer cells, residual disease, and recurrence. More interestingly, they show potential to delineate the heterogeneity, spatial and temporal, of pancreatic cancer. However, the performance of liquid biopsies for the diagnosis varies largely across different studies depending of the technique employed and also the type and stage of the tumor. One approach to improve the detect performance of liquid biopsies is to intensively inspect circulome and to define integrated biomarkers which simultaneously profile circulating tumor cells and DNA, extracellular vesicles, and circulating DNA, or cell free DNA and proteins. Moreover, the diagnostic validity and accuracy of liquid biopsies still need to be comprehensively demonstrated and validated.


Author(s):  
Aitor Rodriguez-Casanova ◽  
Nicolás Costa-Fraga ◽  
Aida Bao-Caamano ◽  
Rafael López-López ◽  
Laura Muinelo-Romay ◽  
...  

Colorectal cancer (CRC) is one of the most common malignancies and is a major cause of cancer-related deaths worldwide. Thus, there is a clinical need to improve early detection of CRC and personalize therapy for patients with this disease. In the era of precision oncology, liquid biopsy has emerged as a major approach to characterize the circulating tumor elements present in body fluids, including cell-free DNA and RNA, circulating tumor cells, and extracellular vesicles. This non-invasive tool has allowed the identification of relevant molecular alterations in CRC patients, including some indicating the disruption of epigenetic mechanisms. Epigenetic alterations found in solid and liquid biopsies have shown great utility as biomarkers for early detection, prognosis, monitoring, and evaluation of therapeutic response in CRC patients. Here, we summarize current knowledge of the most relevant epigenetic mechanisms associated with cancer development and progression, and the implications of their deregulation in cancer cells and liquid biopsy of CRC patients. In particular, we describe the methodologies used to analyze these epigenetic alterations in circulating tumor material, and we focus on the clinical utility of epigenetic marks in liquid biopsy as tumor biomarkers for CRC patients. We also discuss the great challenges and emerging opportunities of this field for the diagnosis and personalized management of CRC patients.


2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (5) ◽  
pp. 865-875 ◽  
Author(s):  
Georgina D. Barnabas ◽  
Keren Bahar-Shany ◽  
Stav Sapoznik ◽  
Limor Helpman ◽  
Yfat Kadan ◽  
...  

Cancers ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (15) ◽  
pp. 3919
Author(s):  
Elisa Dama ◽  
Tommaso Colangelo ◽  
Emanuela Fina ◽  
Marco Cremonesi ◽  
Marinos Kallikourdis ◽  
...  

Lung cancer burden is increasing, with 2 million deaths/year worldwide. Current limitations in early detection impede lung cancer diagnosis when the disease is still localized and thus more curable by surgery or multimodality treatment. Liquid biopsy is emerging as an important tool for lung cancer early detection and for monitoring therapy response. Here, we reviewed recent advances in liquid biopsy for early diagnosis of lung cancer. We summarized DNA- or RNA-based biomarkers, proteins, autoantibodies circulating in the blood, as well as circulating tumor cells (CTCs), and compared the most promising studies in terms of biomarkers prediction performance. While we observed an overall good performance for the proposed biomarkers, we noticed some critical aspects which may complicate the successful translation of these biomarkers into the clinical setting. We, therefore, proposed a roadmap for successful development of lung cancer biomarkers during the discovery, prioritization, and clinical validation phase. The integration of innovative minimally invasive biomarkers in screening programs is highly demanded to augment lung cancer early detection. 


Cancers ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (19) ◽  
pp. 4803
Author(s):  
Satoshi Nagayama ◽  
Siew-Kee Low ◽  
Kazuma Kiyotani ◽  
Yusuke Nakamura

In the field of colorectal cancer (CRC) treatment, diagnostic modalities and chemotherapy regimens have progressed remarkably in the last two decades. However, it is still difficult to identify minimal residual disease (MRD) necessary for early detection of recurrence/relapse of tumors and to select and provide appropriate drugs timely before a tumor becomes multi-drug-resistant and more aggressive. We consider the leveraging of in-depth genomic profiles of tumors as a significant breakthrough to further improve the overall prognosis of CRC patients. With the recent technological advances in methodologies and bioinformatics, the genomic profiles can be analyzed profoundly without delay by blood-based tests—‘liquid biopsies’. From a clinical point of view, a minimally-invasive liquid biopsy is thought to be a promising method and can be implemented in routine clinical settings in order to meet unmet clinical needs. In this review, we highlighted clinical usefulness of liquid biopsies in the clinical management of CRC patients, including cancer screening, detection of MRD, selection of appropriate molecular-targeted drugs, monitoring of the treatment responsiveness, and very early detection of recurrence/relapse of the disease. In addition, we addressed a possibility of adoptive T cell therapies and a future personalized immunotherapy based on tumor genome information.


2020 ◽  
Vol 38 (15_suppl) ◽  
pp. e13687-e13687
Author(s):  
Zhao Yi ◽  
Weizhi Chen ◽  
Ji He

e13687 Background: Early detection through liquid biopsy can significantly increase the successful chances of treatment. The sensitivity and specificity of early detection are limited by lower signal-to-noise ratio. Thus, well design of liquid biopsy panel is important. Methods: We adopted comprehensive data sources for designing the liquid biopsy panel, including databases of TCGA, ICGC, COSMIC, MSK Cancer Hotspots, while the panel of HCCscreen and CancerSeek. We also considered the database of somatic mutations in Chinese cancer patients generated by us (Genecast (Beijing) Biotechnology Co., Ltd.). We first calculated pan-cancer carrier ratio of somatic mutations in each database and constructed the distribution of mutation counts on step-wise increased carrier ratio. Then, we selected the set of somatic mutations with “elbow point” carrier ratio from each database as part of the panel. Finally, we integrated collected hotspots with the panel of HCCscreen and CancerSeek. Results: We selected 408, 521, 214, 146 and 330 hotspots from databases of TCGA, ICGC, COSMIC, MSK Cancer Hotspots and somatic mutations in Chinese cancer patients, respectively. After integration with the panel of HCCscreen and CancerSeek, this designed panel contains 3,334 bases distributed on 23 chromosomes and 915 gene models. Comparison of hotspots collected from different databases showed that few of them shared the same genomic location except for ones from the database of MSK Cancer Hotspots, indicating the well complementarity between them. Especially, there are 186 unique hotspots collected from the database of somatic mutations in Chinese cancer patients, which can improve the sensitivity of early detection for Chinese and Asian population. Next, we evaluated detected sensitivity of the designed panel based on sequencing data of plasma samples from more than 12,000 Chinese cancer patients collected in Genecast. The result showed that the maximum sensitivity is 66.67% for small cell lung cancer and the overall sensitivity is 45.71% for 26 cancer types, in which hotspots uniquely collected from the database of somatic mutations in Chinese cancer patients accounted for 5.11%. Conclusions: We designed a liquid biopsy panel for pan-cancer early detection and evaluated its sensitivity based on sequencing data of plasma samples from more than 12,000 Chinese cancer patients. Satisfactory performance of our designed panel shows its potential application in cancer screening for healthy and highly risky individuals.


Biosensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (12) ◽  
pp. 500
Author(s):  
Sai Mummareddy ◽  
Stuti Pradhan ◽  
Ashwin Kumar Narasimhan ◽  
Arutselvan Natarajan

Recently, considerable interest has emerged in the development of biosensors to detect biomarkers and immune checkpoints to identify and measure cancer through liquid biopsies. The detection of cancer biomarkers from a small volume of blood is relatively fast compared to the gold standard of tissue biopsies. Traditional immuno-histochemistry (IHC) requires tissue samples obtained using invasive procedures and specific expertise as well as sophisticated instruments. Furthermore, the turnaround for IHC assays is usually several days. To overcome these challenges, on-demand biosensor-based assays were developed to provide more immediate prognostic information for clinicians. Novel rapid, highly precise, and sensitive approaches have been under investigation using physical and biochemical methods to sense biomarkers. Additionally, interest in understanding immune checkpoints has facilitated the rapid detection of cancer prognosis from liquid biopsies. Typically, these devices combine various classes of detectors with digital outputs for the measurement of soluble cancer or immune checkpoint (IC) markers from liquid biopsy samples. These sensor devices have two key advantages: (a) a small volume of blood drawn from the patient is sufficient for analysis, and (b) it could aid physicians in quickly selecting and deciding the appropriate therapy regime for the patients (e.g., immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) therapy). In this review, we will provide updates on potential cancer markers, various biosensors in cancer diagnosis, and the corresponding limits of detection, while focusing on biosensor development for IC marker detection.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cláudia Freitas ◽  
Catarina Sousa ◽  
Francisco Machado ◽  
Mariana Serino ◽  
Vanessa Santos ◽  
...  

Liquid biopsy is an emerging technology with a potential role in the screening and early detection of lung cancer. Several liquid biopsy-derived biomarkers have been identified and are currently under ongoing investigation. In this article, we review the available data on the use of circulating biomarkers for the early detection of lung cancer, focusing on the circulating tumor cells, circulating cell-free DNA, circulating micro-RNAs, tumor-derived exosomes, and tumor-educated platelets, providing an overview of future potential applicability in the clinical practice. While several biomarkers have shown exciting results, diagnostic performance and clinical applicability is still limited. The combination of different biomarkers, as well as their combination with other diagnostic tools show great promise, although further research is still required to define and validate the role of liquid biopsies in clinical practice.


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