100 times more efficient
"Liquid biopsy" will improve the treatment of breast cancer and help to avoid unnecessary operations
Evgenia Efimova, Vesti
A new blood test that detects breast cancer will help avoid thousands of unnecessary operations and control the progression of a dangerous disease in its early stages, an international group of researchers has said.
The new method was called TARDIS. According to scientists, it is a kind of "liquid biopsy" that will identify and quantify circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) – tiny fragments of cancer cell DNA that have entered the patient's blood.
The developers note that the new method is a hundred times more sensitive compared to other existing ctDNA blood tests.
The key innovation of this method is that it uses tumor samples from each individual patient and then searches for DNA sequences specific to each individual.
More specifically, the test itself is based on a traditional tumor biopsy. Then the tumor DNA is sequenced, and specialists use bioinformatics methods to identify mutations that may be present in all cancer cells.
With the help of TARDIS, specialists analyzed 80 blood samples taken from 33 women with different stages of breast cancer. The new test revealed ctDNA in each patient before she started treatment. Thus, the scientists proved the effectiveness of the new blood test, since it was able to detect ctDNA even at low concentrations in the blood.
As scientists explain, many patients with early-stage breast cancer begin treatment with medications that help reduce the tumor. After that, doctors prescribe an operation to remove the so-called residual tumor.
Meanwhile, approximately 30% of patients do not have cancer cells, that is, the initial therapy was successful, but they are still prescribed surgery. To date, doctors have no way to find out which women need this procedure and which do not. A new blood test will help solve this issue without surgery.
"[TARDIS] is capable of making a difference. The patient will not need to undergo six to eight cycles of chemotherapy, 15 to 21 weeks of treatment. We will be able to apply TARDIS after one or two cycles, 3-6 weeks. It will help to understand whether there is a decrease in circulating tumor DNA. If no reduction is detected, treatment can be stopped or changed," says one of the authors of the study, Professor Carlos Caldas from the British organization Cancer Research UK.
In other words, such a test will help specialists use blood samples to constantly monitor how well cancer therapy works. All this will allow you to personalize the treatment plan for each individual.
Now the authors of the work intend to conduct a larger study involving more than 200 patients to test the effectiveness of the test and determine the concentration of ctDNA in the blood, which will help specialists determine that preoperative treatment was successful.
A scientific article on the results of the study and a description of the new method is presented in the publication Science Translational Medicine (McDonald et al., Personalized circulating tumor DNA analysis to detect residual disease after neoadjuvant therapy in breast cancer).
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