EFIRM Liquid Biopsy (eLB)
David Wong, Director, University of California Los Angeles
The advent of personalized medicine employing molecular targeted
therapies has markedly changed the treatment of cancer in the past
decade. Although tumor tissue biopsy-based genotyping is the current
clinical practice for guiding clinical management, biopsy procedures can
result in significant morbidity, limiting sampling to static snapshots
which are further limited in scope by the inherent sampling bias of the
analysis itself. To overcome these issues, technologies are needed for
rapid, cost-effective, and noninvasive identification of biomarkers at
various time points during the course of disease. Liquid biopsy is a
rapidly emerging field to address this unmet clinical need as
diagnostics based on cell-free circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) can be a
surrogate for the entire tumor genome. The use of ctDNA via liquid
biopsy will facilitate analysis of tumor genomics that is urgently
needed for molecular targeted therapy. Currently, most targeted
approaches are based on PCR and/or next generation sequencing (NGS) for
liquid biopsy applications with performance concordance in the 60-80%
range with biopsy-based genotyping. We have developed a liquid biopsy
technology “Electric Field Induced Release and Measurement (EFIRM)-
Liquid Biopsy (eLB)” provides the most accurate targeted detection that
can assist clinical treatment decisions for the most common subtype of
lung cancer, non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), where tyrosine kinase
inhibitors (TKI) that can extend the disease progress free survival
period of these patients. eLB requires only 40 µl of sample volume, no
sample processing, reaction time is 15min and can be performed at the
point-of-care or high throughput reference lab using plasma or saliva.
eLB detects actionable EGFR mutations in NSCLC patients with >95%
concordance with biopsy-based genotyping. eLB is minimally (plasma)/
non-invasive (saliva) detecting the most common EGFR gene mutations that
are treatable with TKI such as Gefitinib or Erlotinib to effectively
extend the progression free survival of lung cancer patients.
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