Biomarkers are how cancers give up their secrets
source link: https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/12/biomarkers-are-how-cancers-give-up-their-secrets/
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X-rays are only skin deep —
Biomarkers are how cancers give up their secrets
An animated look at the evolving science behind modern oncology.
Scott K. Johnson - 12/19/2020, 12:10 AM
We’re kicking off a new video series focusing on science, and we’re starting with the science of cancer treatment. There are a lot more options for cancer treatment than there used to be, but new treatments are often more effective because they only work in specific situations. Matching up patients with the treatments that fit them best is one of the things being unlocked by advances in biomarker testing.
Biomarkers are genetic variations, proteins, or chemicals produced by cells that can tell you about the internal workings of a cancer or how the body is responding to it. By measuring these things in cancer tissue samples or even in blood or urine, it’s possible to detect or identify cancers, generate a prognosis, and determine which treatment has the highest chance of success.
It’s a rapidly advancing field. The list of recommended biomarkers to test for has grown, and many more candidate biomarkers have been flagged by studies than are currently approved for use. Next-generation sequencing technologies, which can detect many genetic mutations at once, are enabling common testing for a longer list of genetic biomarkers. Those can highlight so-called “targeted therapy” drugs that work on cells with specific mutations. Other biomarkers are being used to find cancers that will respond to new immunotherapy approaches that leverage the body’s own immune system.
Cancers are complex and varied, which makes treatment even more challenging. The more researchers learn about cancer in general, the more tools can be brought to bear on a particular patient’s cancer. But that requires a more detailed picture of each patient’s cancer, and biomarkers have opened new windows into the cancer cell.
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This is also my field and there are great and informative comments above. I do workflow development for next-gen sequencing data. Things I’d add:
There are two distinct types of biomarkers: somatic and germline. Somatic mutations only exist in mutated cells and their descendants, arise over the subject’s life, and can’t be passed to the next generation. Germline variations are inherited from the subject’s parents and exist in the normal tissues as well as the cancer. When you hear about inherited or familial cancers, those are germline mutations.
Gene expression is another thing we use in cancer. I.e. looking at the levels of expressed RNA to see what the cell is doing.
Another DNA change we look at is the the “copy number variation” or CNV. Normally your cells have two copies of most genes, but damage can cause addition or removal of sections of DNA, and that can also cause cancer.
One aside: several people above mention fecal testing and someone recently coined a term for that: “in fimo”
https://www.gastrojournal.org/article/S0016-5085(18)35403-9/fulltext -
jmunevar Smack-Fu Master, in trainingjump to postI enjoyed the short video, and as a long ars reader and a worker in the cancer research area, I felt compelled to comment. Biomarkers have a ton of potential to show us how cancer works and how we can target cancer cells, I'm not an expert by any means in the complex biological questions that these information show -i work in sw dev-. But I can share our approach, using ex vivo samples of cancer patients we can plate and create a realistic environment to test this new drugs being developed, this way we can test the effectiveness of the treatment in discriminating cancer, but an even more interesting application is in precision medicine, in which we can determine what drugs or drug combination will kill the most cancer without collateral damage to healthy cells. Im exited to see this approaches getting more coverage in more mainstream outlets, and hope high throuput precision medicine becomes a reality
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