Despite a dramatic increase in the survival rates for childhood cancer over the past 60 years, nearly one quarter of all children diagnosed with cancer still die. This makes cancer the commonest cause of death from disease in children in this country. Moreover, even for those children who survive, two thirds will have a major health problem in young adulthood or later due to the severe side effects of their toxic treatments. To address this, safer, more effective treatments, and novel strategies for detecting, monitoring, and treating children’s cancer, are clearly urgently needed.
Liquid Biopsy fills this need as it allows disease to be monitored and characterised through a minimally invasive mechanism. It has traditionally focused around enumeration of circulating tumour DNA (ctDNA) and circulating tumour cells (CTCs) isolated from peripheral blood draws. The ACRF Child Cancer Liquid Biopsy Program has designed and begun implementing a range of tests to molecularly characterise a patient’s individual tumour. The results of which will be used to inform personalised medicine approaches and guide patient management.
During this talk, we describe how we have leveraged both fresh and bio banked samples to develop and to optimise novel Genomic Cytometry assays into clinically relevant workflows. Specifically, these include:
By using examples in the disease streams above, we will highlight the strengths and weaknesses of each approach, discuss how we are leveraging the cross over between genomics and cytometry and describe, in detail, how we are using molecular approaches to make clinically relevant measurements of disease using Genomic Cytometry.