This online seminar provided insight into the use of liquid biopsy approaches to monitor drug response and resistance. 

Tumor heterogeneity and the molecular evolution of resistance are tightly linked concepts that are important factors for understanding how and why cancer patients respond to anti-cancer therapies. Circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) and non-invasive serial liquid biopsies are tools that allow for a temporal molecular understanding of therapeutic response and resistance. Liquid biopsy approaches offer a considerable advantage for analyses of cancer patients as they allow for the non-invasive detection of somatic genetic alterations in multiple metastatic lesions throughout the course of therapy. 

During this webinar, Michael Teufel, director of biomarker strategy at Bayer HealthCare, shared lessons learned from digital PCR and next-generation sequencing analysis of ctDNA. Michael’s talk detailed how liquid biopsy-based approaches address the limitations of tissue-based testing. He also discussed the head-to-head comparison results of NGS and digital PCR approaches on samples from two clinical trials.