Blood test shows potential for early detection of lung cancer

Dana-Farber: A test that analyzes free-floating DNA in the blood may be able to detect early-stage lung cancer, a preliminary report from the ongoing Circulating Cell-Free Genome Atlas (CCGA) study suggests.
The findings, from one of the first studies to explore whether sequencing blood-borne DNA is a feasible approach to the early cancer detection, will be featured in a press briefing today and presented at the 2018 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting.

Liquid Biopsy Can Help Predict Outcomes in Metastatic Triple-Negative Breast Cancer

Columbus: A clinically relevant “liquid biopsy” test can be used to profile cancer genomes from blood and predict survival outcomes for patients with metastatic triple negative breast cancer (TNBC), according to new research published by a multi-institutional team of researchers with The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center — Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute (OSUCCC – James), the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

Scalpel free with the "liquid biopsies"

Berkeley: Losing a breast or a lung to cancer leaves a scar, both physical and emotional. But even a biopsy to determine if a tumor is cancerous, or to track a tumor’s response to drugs, brings short-term pain and can miss signs of metastasis. So, the possibility of a scalpel-free biopsy has been something of a holy grail — a way to relieve trauma, speed diagnosis and shrink medical bills.
The ideal non-surgical approach might start with a simple blood draw. Snippets of DNA or RNA detected in the blood could be analyzed for the presence of a tumor; whether it has metastasized and whether it carries mutations for resistance to specific drugs. Such  “liquid biopsies” may now be within reach. 

Liquid Biopsy Using ctDNA Takes Aim at Pancreatic Cancer

Clinicalomics: Investigators from Sorbonne University in Paris have now assessed the feasibility and the prognostic value of circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) in pancreatic adenocarcinoma, a significant advance in a hard-to-diagnose disease that is expected to become the second leading cause of cancer death in the U.S. by 2030. There remain several challenges to conducting translational research on pancreatic cancer, including the difficulty in obtaining tumor samples from patients, since most studies have been limited to patients with the resectable disease until now. However, only 10% to 15% of patients with pancreatic adenocarcinoma have resectable disease at diagnosis—making identification of robust prognostic or predictive biomarkers critical for all patients with pancreatic adenocarcinoma, whatever the stage of the disease.