Liquid Biopsy May Assist With Early Pancreatic Cancer Detection

In a conversation with CancerNetwork®, Ajay Goel, PhD, AGAF, spoke about a presentation he gave at the 15th Annual Ruesch Center Symposium highlighting the use of liquid biopsy biomarkers as a potential method for earlier detection of suspected pancreatic cancer.

According to Goel, founding chair of the new Department of Molecular Diagnostics and Experimental Therapeutics, founding director of Biotech Innovations at Beckman Research Institute, and associate director of Basic Science at Comprehensive Cancer Center of City of Hope in Duarte, California, most patients with pancreatic cancer are diagnosed with advanced disease, which may confer a high rate of mortality. Timely use of liquid biopsy, a non-invasive blood-based tool, may help with detecting pancreatic cancer in an earlier state, thereby increasing the likelihood of improving patient outcomes.

Although the pancreatic cancer landscape hasn’t reached this point yet, Goel stated that the field is on the cusp of an era in which practices can employ liquid biopsy and similar blood tests to help improve care for patients.

Transcript:

At this symposium, I shared some of the work we have recently done on developing liquid biopsy biomarkers for early detection of [pancreatic cancer]. Pancreatic cancer is one of those cancers that have poor survival outcomes. Most of the patients often get diagnosed late with advanced-stage disease, and that’s why there’s a high degree of mortality.

[Approximately] 70% to 90% of patients do not have a resectable disease when they’re first diagnosed. That’s the challenge because if you don’t have a resectable disease, the surgeons cannot operate on you. They cannot take the cancer out, and that’s the best way to cure or improve the survival of these patients. Most of these patients, when they first present, already have advanced disease. In this symposium, we presented a blood test that can possibly be used in patients who are at risk of getting pancreatic cancer. We can use this blood test on them in a timely fashion and find the earliest possible disease we can intercept, [thus] offering these patients better outcomes and better survival.

My sincere hope is that my colleagues, who saw the findings we presented from our work and [from] others who presented their work, basically glean upon and appreciate the fact that we have come a long way in terms of developing liquid biopsy. Now, we are at the cusp of an era where we are not too far from using these modalities, these approaches, as a routine way of managing and caring for patients with cancer effectively. We are not there yet, but I feel that everybody agrees that we are not too far from using some of these assays, some of these non-invasive blood tests for [patients with] cancer, especially for those with pancreatic and other lethal cancer types.

Reference

Goel A. Liquid biopsy biomarkers for the early detection of pancreatic cancer. Presented at the 15th Annual Ruesch Center Symposium; November 21-23, 2024; Washington, DC.