Stenzl - Figure 35
Personalized Assay Design Strategy for:
FIG. 35: Tissue samples are not very helpful during chemotherapy; what is needed is information about possible changes in the molecular context of the patient. The most practical way of getting that information will be to draw blood and get ‘liquid biopsies’ or DNA information from the plasma. This means defining the genetic signatures from the DNA of the primary tumor, and then in the course of the disease, looking at the changes in that DNA by extracting cell-free, tumor-related DNA from the same patient.
There has been nice work from Scandinavia[22,23] and Germany, reporting good information from tumor-related, cell-free DNA extracted from plasma and even in some in cases from urine.
References
Birkenkamp-Demtröder K, Nordentoft I, Christensen E, et al. Genomic alterations in liquid biopsies from patients with bladder cancer. Eur Urol. 2016;70:75−82 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.eururo.2016.01.007
Christensen E, Birkenkamp-Demtröder K, Nordentoft I, et al. Liquid biopsy analysis of FGFR3 and PIK3CA hotspot mutations for disease surveillance in bladder Eur Urol. 2017;71:961−9 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.eururo.2016.12.016
