VIDEO: Circulating tumor DNA ‘next frontier’ in breast cancer
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In this video, Angela DeMichele, MD, MSCE, co-leader of the Breast Cancer Research Program and director of the Breast Cancer Clinical Trials Unit at Penn Medicine, spoke with Healio about circulating tumor DNA in breast cancer.
Research on the use of circulating tumor DNA was presented at the 2021 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium.
“This is a new technology, but what it’s really reflecting is the ability to find tumor cells, or fragments of tumor cells, within the blood.” DeMichele said. “We call this minimal residual disease, and we can use these types of tools early in the disease process to identify the patients who, after all their initial therapy, might still have tumor cells remaining.”
She added “I think that this is going to be the next frontier, and we’re already seeing trials that are attempting to identify these patients who still may have microscopic amounts of tumor within the blood stream.”
Some trials, according to DeMichele, are researching “sleeper cells” that remain dormant in patients’ bone marrow.
“I think we saw some of the challenges of trying to do these trials — this is very early days — trying to understand how to measure these different types of minimal residual disease and how to target it, what the right timing is,” she said. “Lots of things are really unique to trials in this setting, and you’re going to be seeing much more of that in meetings to come.”
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