Cool Stuff

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13 Feb 2017

Liquid Biopsy Boom

By Jay Goth

If liquid biopsies can prove effective as a diagnostic tool in the pre- and post-cancer settings, some in the industry predict the market’s value could balloon to anywhere from $20 billion to over $100 billion, according to a recent article BioPharma Dive.

Forentis finds this interesting, as much of our focus is on funding the research that can bring these types of diagnostics to market. Advancing precision medicine by applying new technologies like liquid biopsies is in our DNA. Liquid biopsies and clinical trial enrichment are critical to developing the precision treatments and companion diagnostics that will make precision medicine a reality.

“Another use of liquid biopsies is in clinical trials. As targeted therapies proliferate, pharma companies need to cast a wide net in order to enroll patients who match the specific criteria of drug studies. Using liquid biopsies to screen patients could greatly accelerate enrollment as well as lowering costs.”

– BioPharma Dive

What is exciting to us is that while the industry is focused on circulating tumor cell biomarkers, we are going deeper into the human biology. If you are interested in finding out more about how we are accessing multi-omic biomarkers – give us a call!

10 Feb 2017

CAR-T Advances in Cancer Fight

By Jay Goth

Doctors in London say they have cured two babies of leukemia in the world’s first attempt to treat cancer with genetically engineered immune cells from a donor.

Treatments using engineered T-cells, commonly known as CAR-T, are new and not yet sold commercially. But they have shown stunning success against blood cancers. In studies so far by Novartis and Juno, about half of patients are permanently cured after receiving altered versions of their own blood cells.

Check out the entire article at MIT Technology Review.

06 Feb 2017

Cancer Breath Test

By Jay Goth

A test that measures the levels of five chemicals in the breath has shown promising results for the detection of cancers of the oesophagus and stomach in a large patient trial presented at the European Cancer Congress 2017. The new research aimed to test whether this “chemical signature” that seemed to typify cancer could be the basis of a diagnostic test.

“A breath test could be used as a non-invasive, first-line test to reduce the number of unnecessary endoscopies. In the longer term this could also mean earlier diagnosis and treatment, and better survival.”

– Dr Sheraz Markar, NIHR Clinical Trials Fellow from Imperial College London

The trial was based on the results of previous research that suggested differences in the levels of specific chemicals (butyric, pentanoic and hexanoic acids, butanal, and decanal) between patients with stomach or oesophageal cancer and patients with upper gastrointestinal symptoms without cancer.

The results showed that the test was 85% accurate overall, with a sensitivity of 80% and a specificity of 81%. This means that not only was the breath test good at picking up those who had cancer (sensitivity), it was also good at correctly identifying who did not have cancer (specificity).

Find out more about this test at http://bit.ly/2juaaGQ

27 Jan 2017

The Amazing World of Disordered Proteins

By Jay Goth

For more than a century, biologists have thought that the proteins carrying out functions like driving chemical reactions, passing signals up and down the cell’s information superhighway, or maybe hanging molecular tags onto DNA are like rigid cogs in the cell’s machinery.

From Quanta Magazine article

But according to an article in Quanta Magazine recent studies estimate that up to half of the total amino acid sequence that makes up proteins in humans doesn’t fold into a distinct shape. This fluidity — dubbed “intrinsic disorder” — endows proteins with a set of superpowers that structured proteins don’t have.

“The key now is that we need to understand how these proteins are functioning in biology,” said Peter Wright, a structural biologist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California.

See the full article here.

19 Jan 2017

The Missing Link that Binds the Microbiome with Human Health

By Jay Goth

The human microbiome is large and complex. It is thought that there are as many indigenous microbes in your body as there are other cells. The only way to understand how the microbiome’s presence affects the body at any given time is through studying the comprehensive or global metabolome—the collection of metabolites that the microbiome and host produces and interacts with. Metabolites are the microbiome’s language.

human entrails under X-rays. 3d render.


In short, trying to resolve the link between the microbiome and human health without looking at the metabolome is like trying to predict a married couple’s compatibility without observing how they communicate with each other.

Since a metabolomics approach allows scientists to examine all the small molecules in our body, including hormones, amino acids, co-factors, neurotransmitters, and other compounds, it gives us a shot at understanding every step of disease etiology, from gene to phenotype.

Read the entire article in GEN

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