Abstract

Tracking Circulating DNA for Cancer Patient Follow-Up

Valérie Taly, CNRS Research Director, Group Leader and Professor, Université Paris Cité

Tracking of circulating cell-free nucleic acids in body effluents has been greatly facilitated by recent technological developments including droplet-based digital PCR and optimized NGS. These technics now allow to reach unprecedented sensitivity and precision for rare sequences detection and quantification. Strategies allowing analysis of several genetic and epigenetic cancer-specific alterations have will be presented for the detection of tumor DNA in patient samples. Moreover to demonstrate the pertinence of such procedures to overcome clinical oncology challenges, the results of several clinical studies will be presented. In particular, we will illustrate the pertinence of these approaches to monitor circulating tumor DNA in plasma (so-called liquid biopsy) for the follow-up of patients with localized or advanced cancers.