Biotech Values

[DewDiligence]

A liquid biopsy can detect some things a biopsy can’t:

https://www.evaluate.com/vantage/articles/interviews/liquid-biopsies-future-cancer-diagnosis

Not to be left behind, Thermo Fisher is developing its own liquid biopsy platform, the Oncomine Lung cfDNA Assay. A recent study looking at matched tissue and liquid biopsies showed that among 94 non-small cell lung cancer patients tested with the Oncomine assay at diagnosis there was 88% concordance between the tissue and plasma samples.

Interestingly the Oncomine test found mutations including EGFR, ALK and Braf that were not present in the initial tissue biopsy in 29 of the plasma samples. These were not false positives,…but a reflection of tumour heterogeneity – the part of the tumour that was excised only contained some of the tumour’s range of mutations.

This ability to capture all of a patient’s mutations is another advantage blood testing has over tumour sampling. It also comes into play in metastatic disease; different metastatic sites could accumulate additional mutations not found in the primary tumour.

I didn’t realize TMO had entered this arena.