A new, non-invasive procedure called a "liquid biopsy" that relies solely on analyzing blood samples has the potential to revolutionize cancer treatment by making early cancer detection possible.
Basically a blood test, a liquid biopsy detects cancer by analyzing blood samples drawn from a patient in much the same manner as blood typing. It does away with painful, expensive and invasive procedures that require skin incisions to remove parts of a tumor for later analysis.
A liquid biopsy detects cancer cells or the DNA shed by cancerous tumors into the blood. More importantly, it allows physicians to determine if the cancer is spreading to other parts of a person's body.
A liquid biopsy provides a more detailed view of how a cancer works and spreads throughout the body compared to the standard tissue samples that only provide limited information about a cancer.
It also offers advantages in non-small cell lung cancer compared with conventional tissue biopsy of tumors, said Oncology Today.
A blood draw is minimally invasive for the patient; can be made at the point-of-care and can be performed in succession and inexpensively to monitor disease progression. This approach isn't possible with tissue biopsies in the lungs.
Medical experts believe liquid biopsies have the potential to radically alter cancer treatment for the better. It brings cancer treatment closer to the Holy Grail of cancer research: early detection of cancerous tumors. This brings with it the potential to save millions of lives, said Medical Daily.
"We reasoned that tissue biopsies would only offer a snapshot of the overall tumor mass and might therefore be ill suited to capture the multiclonal feature of the resistant disease," wrote Dr. Luis Diaz of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in a study about liquid biopsies published in 2014.
Liquid biopsies are therefore "more likely to capture the overall genetic complexity of tumors in patients with advanced disease."
Dr. Diaz also described early detection as "the Holy Grail of cancer research".
Researchers from Johns Hopkins used liquid biopsies to identify tumors at an early stage. They continued monitoring the tumors for metastasis (or the spread of cancer from one organ to another) and identifying if they resisted cancer treatments.