Can peripheral blood sampling be combined with radiation therapy for cancer? Elizabeth Tracey reports

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Cancers continue to change, or mutate, as time goes on, often acquiring the ability to outmaneuver treatments. Valsamo Anagnostou, a cancer researcher at Johns Hopkins, has used repeated blood sampling for cancer cells with treatment strategies like radiation to stay ahead of the disease.

Anagnostou : One can also derive very meaningful information by looking at the footprint off the cancer in the bloodstream and then doing repeated measurements, where is the future of biomarker driven intervention. You can certainly use characteristics of the tumor to have an ability is going to be response or not but then you can recalibrate that dynamically by liquid biopsy analysis. and so we evaluated the effect of radiation and what we see is that overlaying liquid biopsy analysis is very very meaningful.   :30

Anagnostou says this complex and dynamic approach to cancer treatment is increasingly employed clinically and becomes more practical as streamlined methods of detection and analysis are developed. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.