Personalized blood biopsies may provide signal of cancer recurrence
Personalized blood biopsies, which scan patient blood samples for genetic traces of cancer, could potentially provide an earlier warning of metastatic cancer before it is picked up through standard monitoring. Researchers in the Gerstner Center for Cancer Diagnostics at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute have increased the sensitivity of blood biopsies, demonstrating that they can monitor up to hundreds of different cancer mutations in blood samples from individual patients, with the potential to detect cancer recurrence — and inform treatment decisions — years before traditional approaches could. The study appears in Clinical Cancer Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research. In the new study, the scientists tested their approach on blood samples from breast cancer patients. Breast cancer is most deadly when it comes back, often years after their first treatments for the disease. Existing diagnostics aren’t yet sensitive enough to tell whether a patient’s initial therapy eliminated the...