A new study published by Penn researchers at the Abramson Cancer Center (ACC) and the Center for Personalized Diagnostics (CPD) suggests that a a non-invasive liquid biopsy may be a more effective and suitable alternative to the gold standard tissue biopsy to detect clinically relevant mutations for patients with advanced lung cancer. In patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) treated at the ACC, mutations detected from liquid biopsies (cell-free circulating tumor DNA or ctDNA captured from blood) closely paralleled the mutations from tissue biopsies identified in next generation sequencing tests: EGRF, TP53, and ALK, to name a few. In several cases, liquid biopsies captured clinically relevant mutations not found in tissue biopsies as patients’ disease progressed.
Read the Department of Communications news release.