ASH 2021 | Non-invasive liquid biopsy to assess myeloma precursor disease pathology

We’re presenting today, some of our work on circulating tumor cells and how you can do whole genome sequencing from a small number of circulating tumor cells and potentially change completely the way we think. So the standard of care is we do bone marrow biopsies, and we do FISH and cytogenetics. But the problem with that is one, it’s invasive because bone marrow biopsy is not fun for anyone to do it. Two, FISH and cytogenetics is methods that we’ve used 20, 30 years ago. Can we improve on that? Can we change the spectrum and try to start to use next generation sequencing? So here we found a new method where not only you can isolate small numbers of circulating tumor cells, but you can also do whole genome sequencing on those numbers without amplification.

And then you can add to that by actually calling in a new way, the translocations, the copy number alterations, and the mutations, and hopefully you can give that back to the patients. So it’s really a direct to patient way of saying let’s change the way we think of just doing bone marrow biopsies, and FISH and cytogenetics into let’s isolate circulating tumor cells in your blood, and potentially give you back the same information, but much better, much richer to prognosticate you, to help you in decision making of which therapy you’re going to choose, but potentially also to understand better whether they would respond or not on therapy.