Circulating tumor DNA in early-stage breast cancer: personalized biomarkers for occult metastatic disease and risk of relapse?

Taija M Af Hällström,Maija Puhka,Olli Kallioniemi

doi:10.15252/emmm.201505332

Taija M Af Hällström, Maija Puhka + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.15252/emmm.201505332

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Journal: EMBO molecular medicine	Publication Date: Jun 1, 2015
Citations: 4	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: University of Helsinki

Abstract

The availability of blood-based markers to predict response of a solid tumor to treatment, estimate patient prognosis and diagnose relapse well before clinical symptoms arise, is a long-standing hope in clinical oncology. Ideally, assays designed to provide such information should be inexpensive (at least in the foreseeable future), simple, and, of course, predictive of the clinical evolution of the disease. While early research focused on circulating glycosylated tumor-derived protein biomarkers, the focus is now rapidly shifting to new opportunities, such as circulating tumor cells, extracellular vesicles, micro-RNAs and cancer-derived cell-free DNA a.k.a. circulating tumor-derived DNA (ctDNA).

Highlights

The availability of blood-based markers to predict response of a solid tumor to treatment, estimate patient prognosis and diagnose relapse well before clinical symptoms arise, is a long-standing hope in clinical oncology
I n this issue of EMBO Molecular Medicine, Olsson et al (2015) provide exciting evidence for the value of circulating tumorderived DNA (ctDNA) measurements in early-stage breast cancer
The main goal was to investigate whether the patient-specific plasma ctDNA assay could detect disease relapse and occult metastatic disease before clinical evidence of the recurrence

Summary

Introduction

The availability of blood-based markers to predict response of a solid tumor to treatment, estimate patient prognosis and diagnose relapse well before clinical symptoms arise, is a long-standing hope in clinical oncology. I n this issue of EMBO Molecular Medicine, Olsson et al (2015) provide exciting evidence for the value of ctDNA measurements in early-stage breast cancer. Based on their results, elevated plasma ctDNA levels preceded clinical detection of relapse in 86% of the patients with an average lead-time of 11 months.

Results

Conclusion