alt Hacker NewsWould you say ctDNA tools are sensitive and specific enough now to be able to make a decision about post op adjuvant therapies? “Now that I’ve had surgery, did the R0 resection get it all, or do I need to do chemo and challenging medication like mitotane?”
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refurb • yesterday at 3:19 AM
It seems like adjuvant treatment is rather routine at this point?
And the question would be “do I believe the test when it tells me the cancer is gone?” When you know it’s not 100% accurate?
Or do you always do the adjuvant treatment considering the very small chance the test is wrong has a very high cost (death)?
I’ve seen it most commonly thought of as using ctDNA to detect relapse earlier.
So, more like — did the tumor come back? And if that does happen, with ctDNA, can you detect that there is a relapse before you would otherwise find it with standard imaging. Most studies I’ve seen have shown that this happens and ctDNA is a good biomarker for early detection of relapse.
The case for proactively looking for circulating tumor DNA without an initial diagnosis or underlying genetic condition is a bit dicier IMHO. For example, what if really like to know (I haven’t read this article, but I’m pretty familiar with the field) is how many people had a detectable cancer in their plasma (ctDNA), but didn’t receive a cancer diagnosis. It’s been known for a while that you can detect precancerous lesions well before a formal cancer diagnosis. But, what’s still an open question AFAIK, is how many people have precancerous lesions or positive ctDNA hits that don’t form a tumor?
(I’ve done a little work in this area)