This week we are at the 2015 ASCO Genitourinary Cancers Symposium, held in Orlando, Fla. Our collaborators are presenting three studies that demonstrate how the Epic Sciences no cell left behind™ platform could be used as a blood test for certain types of metastatic prostate and bladder cancers — liquid biopsies to predict which patients will best respond to certain therapies before they are treated.
Today’s blog post highlights one of our studies presented at this week’s meeting:
While metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer patients are treated with ARS inhibitors or taxanes, neuroendocrine prostate cancer — a later stage of the disease — do not respond well to these drugs but tend to responds best to platinum based chemotherapy. Yet there’s no easy way to determine if a patient is transitioning to neuroendocrine prostate cancer and therefore needs to switch treatment courses.
To meet this need, blood samples were collected from 12 patients with neuroendocrine prostate cancer and 15 patients with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer including five who had atypical disease and were suspicious of transitioning to neuroendocrine prostate cancer. Using our no cell left behind™ technology, circulating tumor cells were captured and analyzed for the presence or absence of certain biomarkers.
Clear molecular and cellular differences were discovered between circulating tumor cells collected from patients with these three types of prostate cancer. Of note, four of five atypical patients had evidence of neuroendocrine prostate cancer related CTCs and were likely transitioning to neuroendocrine disease.
If these exciting results are confirmed, doctors may one day be able to use a simple blood test as a liquid biopsy to diagnose and treat neuroendocrine prostate cancer earlier than current techniques allow.