Alexandra Sommer

So, I'm Alexandra Sommer. I'm working for Tecan, Switzerland, and I'm a product manager for Clinical Diagnostics.

Provisional biopsy means that you need to have surgery, and take tissue. Can be a small ones with a needle biopsy, can be a CT biopsy. That's an invasive procedure that comes also with some inherent risks for the patients, obviously. Because some people might not be suited for surgery, too young, too old, or sometimes it's also hard to get access to the tumor.

And another problem is also the diagnostic part. So when you take a tissue biopsy, you never know if you have sufficient material, and afterwards, you also have to fixate it so it's no longer a native material. And that's a total difference to what you have in a liquid biopsy. In liquid biopsy, that's based on bodily fluids, can be urine, can be blood, can be cerebral-spinal fluids. And the advantage of it is that you have an easy access.

A liquid biopsy is looking at different biomarkers in, for example, blood. So that's usually cells shed from the tumor. Can be circulating tumor cells, that's what they're called, or tumor DNA, which you can find. People are also looking into other biomarkers, more specific, biomarkers to cancers, single markers. They also look into methylation patterns, then post-translational modifications of proteins. So that's coming more and more. So, this gives an overall picture of the cancer much better than a little piece of a tissue biopsy.

The sensitivity which we have there for liquid biopsy is very high. That allows a very early detection of potential cancers because you can very early on detect remaining, let's say, genetic material in blood that is shed from the tumor. And the sensitivity is so much higher that people are also looking a lot into the screening assays, right? That also helps a lot identifying, for example, if you have a high-risk individual group you're looking at.

If you have a good liquid biopsy screening assay, it can test for more than just a single cancer. It can look for several cancer types, which you might have. And in terms of the treatment plans, when you look at how it can help creating personalized treatment plans for patients.

Yeah, every patient has a very specific genetic makeup and specific biomarkers, and the combination of all of it can be unique, and that helps generating a very personalized treatment plan, which really addresses the cancer or the tumor you have and allows the physician also to adjust treatment. So because you can do monitoring using liquid biopsy, it's very easy to detect changes in biomarkers in the blood, or also the genetic makeup because they change over time.

Another advantage, I think, is that through genotyping, we can really follow the change in the tumor development. So, while the disease maybe advances, there are changes in the tumor, and you need to monitor regularly. And so you need to have easy access and not big surgeries. And that can be done with liquid biopsy, and that helps making educated decisions in the treatment.

One of the, I think, biggest advantages this offers is after treatment, you can look at the biomarkers, they normally recede. So they would go down, and you can regularly check and see if there is minimal residual disease or if the disease recurs. And I think that's very helpful because you need to do that in a very regular fashion. And that's something which you can't do with tissue biopsy, or hardly do.

Liquid biopsies in the future will have a huge impact on patient outcome. It's helping them manage the disease, detect recurrence. We can monitor minimal residual disease, and this gives patients also safety, and a chance to have a better life. And for the physician, it's a chance to also change treatments early if they see cancer recurrence. So I think, in general, that's something we all look forward to.